book-designmarginsoverlays
Is there any way to overlay some lines and dimensions on the document so that one can see where the margins end and more easily examine the overall layout and ratios of elements on the page?
See for example, some of the illustrations of frameworks in this article on the canons of page construction and this one on margins (which displays dimensions).
The 1 inch offsets come actually from TeX itself, and are kind of a pain because you need to take them into account as late as possible in any calculations.
The paper size is defined in a configuration file (I forget its name), but with PDFTeX, you should be able to use commands \pdfpagewidth (default 210 true mm for A4), and \pdfpageheight (default 297 true mm for A4).
Most relevant settings regarding page layout are:
\hsize for h orizontal size (typeblock width)\vsize for v ertical size (typeblock height)\hoffset for h orizontal offset (offset from 1 inch from left edge of paper)\voffset for v ertical offset (offset from 1 inch from top edge of paper)For spread layout, you can just toggle the \hoffset in the output routine.
Because you define the \hsize and \hoffset, there's no need to define margins, but I guess you could write a macro for counting \hsize and \hoffset based on given margins.
Note that the line widths may not look even in the posted PNGS. This is an artefact of a small screen/PDF viewer combination and has nothing to do with the actual PDF. It just affects my PNG clippings.
I think this solution satisfies the various desiderata:
\steps.
tikzpictures, even if these use overlay, remember picture themselves.
\showgrid can be specified anywhere on the page where the grid is required, including before any tikzpictures, even if they themselves use overlay, remember picture.atbegshi.)I drew the grid by hand, drawing the horizontal and vertical lines separately. I use the backgrounds library to ensure that the lighter lines are not drawn over the darker lines (which looks rather odd).
I use atbegshi to ensure the grid is placed above any and all page content.
\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\usetikzlibrary{backgrounds}
\usepackage{anyfontsize}
\newcommand{\showgrid}{%
\AtBeginShipoutNext{\AtBeginShipoutAddToBoxForeground{%
\begin{tikzpicture}
[
overlay,
remember picture,
inner sep=0pt,
outer sep=0pt,
minor line/.style={help lines, draw=gray!25, on background layer},
major line/.style={help lines, draw=gray},
]
\foreach \step in {0,...,210} {
\pgfmathsetmacro\gridlineconfig{ifthenelse(equal(int(mod(\step,10)),0),"major line","minor line")}%
\draw [\gridlineconfig] ($(current page.north west) + (\step mm,0)$) -- ($(current page.south west) + (\step mm,0)$);
}
\foreach \step in {0,...,297} {
\pgfmathsetmacro\gridlineconfig{ifthenelse(equal(int(mod(\step,10)),0),"major line","minor line")}%
\draw [\gridlineconfig] ($(current page.north west) - (0,\step mm)$) -- ($(current page.north east) - (0,\step mm)$);
\node [anchor=north] at ($ (current page.north west) + (\step mm,0) $) {\fontsize{1}{2}\selectfont \step};
\node [anchor=west] at ($ (current page.north west) - (0,\step mm) $) {\fontsize{1}{2}\selectfont \step};
}
\end{tikzpicture}
}%
}%
}
\usepackage{atbegshi}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\showgrid
\begin{tikzpicture}[overlay,remember picture,every node/.style={fill=red,inner sep=0pt,outer sep=0pt}]%
\node [minimum width=2cm,minimum height=2cm] at (current page.center) {};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
Best Answer
Just to add another useful package that does it:
(as many people load
geometryanyways, it is a nice gadget)