[Tex/LaTex] Illogical twoside margins

Question

Shouldn't the twoside option produce a wider margin at the binding/spine edge, rather than the other way around?
I'm using \documentclass[twoside]{report}.

Answer 1

I do not think there is anything illogical regarding the standard LaTeX class page design. This page design does not include any allowances for binding offsets. The binding offsets are a function of the thickness of paper as well as the number of pages in a book and the method of binding. If you binding a book or report with a spiral binding machine, it will need a different set of page dimensions.

Page layout is buried in tradition and history and you can read more about it at the canons of page construction.

Besides Bringhurst which was quoted by Brent in his excellent answer Tschichold also devotes a large portion of his writings in the study of page layouts. As you can see from the image below he is also advocating large outer margins. Another commonly forgotten reason, besides what is thought as good typography, is that you do not want to have a line width greater than 1-1.7 alphabets (for readability), so the size of your paper and the size of your default font also has an effect. The Koma class goes as far as to design margins based on the font size. (European books also tend to favour smaller margins).

Now the exceptions. Modern trend is to have the margins almost equal, plus anything from 3-6mm binding offset and the reason is screen reading. Here is a copy from a book, I like the design with narrower margins (but then it does not use any margin material such as sidenotes). On the other extreme Tufte books and the Tufte-book class uses a wide margin, and brings the design into the margin as Bringhurst suggests. Similarly the ltxdoc class uses wider outer margins to accommodate macro names in the margins.

Here is an actual "grid" based on Tschichold's principles,

As John Stuart Mill said "All good things which exist are the fruits of originality". Nobody stops you from experimenting.