People are nowadays increasingly often reading papers on screen, using ebook readers, tablet PCs, laptops, etc. A typical PDF file generated with Latex is far from ideal for such use; in particular, there is a lot of empty space around the text.
Of course there are applications with which you can take any PDF file and trim the margins. But when I'm preparing PDF versions of my own papers, it might make more sense to do this directly in Latex.
Hence two questions:
1. How do I easily prepare a PDF file for screen reading if I'm lazy? In particular, I don't want to change the line breaks or page breaks or placement of floating figures, etc. I'd like to keep the original font size, \textheight, \textwidth, etc. However, I'd like to remove as much white space as possible around the body (and possibly between the body and footer/header).
Using the geometry package and experimenting with its settings might look like an obvious idea, but it doesn't seem to be easy to preserve the original layout (unless you manually re-set textheight, textwidth, etc.).
For backwards-compatibility, I'd prefer to have a solution that works both with pdflatex and with latex + dvips + ps2pdf; in particular, I'd prefer to not add any special command line switches on dvips command line for specifying the non-standard paper size. And I'd like to have a somewhat robust solution that I can use not only with standard class files such as article and amsart but also with publisher-specific styles.
2. What are the best practices to follow if I'm not lazy? If I'm willing to re-do the layout, are there any guidelines of recommended font sizes, fonts, page dimensions, aspect ratios, margin sizes, etc., that I should follow? Do we perhaps have a Latex document class or a package that produces an ebook-friendly layout?
Best Answer
PhilTeX has a nice article about it: Reading PDFs on portables. It answers some of your TeXnical questions, but I'm afraid it is hard to give advice on things like aspect ratios and font sizes. The medium you're targetting is very diverse and something that works for a laptop might not work on a Kindle.
Update: I just stumbled across a talk on typesetting for the iPad given at TUG2010. It could be interesting, he gives a demo too.