booksmargins
How do I ensure that, using the documentclass book, my left and right page margins are equal?
I can't use oneside as a class option, because it mangles my headers, and I can't use the geometry package.
I tried
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{15.5pt}
\setlength{\evensidemargin}{15.5pt}
(found here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Page_Layout#Odd_and_even_margins), but that did not at all lead to equally sized margins.
There must be a simple way to do this!
You're saying
Thanks to this [...] the text and tables' length would be the same
I'd say it's more important to have a consistent line length in your document. There's a reason why the standard LaTeX margins are quite wide. There's a rule of thumb that goes something like "Don't put more than 66 characters in one line" (otherwise it gets harder for readers to jump from the end of the line to the beginning of the next line).
So instead of making the margins of the entire page smaller, which yields undesirably long lines in normal paragraphs, you could just set the table a bit wider, as shown for figures in Center figure that is wider than \textwidth. Here's an adaption of Martin Scharrer's solution:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}% just for filler text
\usepackage[pass,showframe]{geometry}% just to show the margin borders
\begin{document}
\begin{table}
\makebox[\textwidth][c]{
\begin{tabular}{p{0.6\textwidth}p{0.6\textwidth}}
\lipsum[1] & \lipsum[1]
\end{tabular}
}
\caption{Extra-wide table}
\end{table}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}
This does not look really nice -- it's hard to read, but setting margin=0.5in generates small margins.
I don't recommend this.
\documentclass[a4paper]{book}
\usepackage[margin=0.5in,nomarginpar]{geometry}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blindtext[10]
\end{document}
Best Answer
You don't say why you can't use
geometrywhich allows you to specify the margins directly, so makes this easier, but latex does not directly specify the right margin, you can specify the left margin, and the text width and the right margin is just whatever space is left over.So assuming you don't want to change
\textwidthor\paperwidthyou want the left and right margins to be half the difference between those, and then you want to set\@oddsidemarginto be 1in less than that (as by default the origin is 1in in from the top left corner).so
Note that this assumes that
\paperwidthis set correctly for your paper (a4paperorusletteroptions typically) and that the pdf media size has been set to the paper size (loading graphicx, or geometry or hyperref would do that) or setor in newer luatex the same but without
pdfin the command names.