[Tex/LaTex] Reduce page margins using the res document class

cvmarginsresume

In order to make my resume more dense and get more content on a page, I wanted to reduce page margins.
I had been struggling with this issue for a long time and couldn't find any good complete solution online.

However, after several pitfalls, I've managed to resolve all problems now and thought I'd share my solution and maybe help others struggling with the same.

Feel free to edit and improve

Best Answer

This guide assumes you use a file res.cls and are able to modify it

Reduce margins

The geometry package helps reducing page margins, e.g. like

\usepackage[margin=0.5in]{geometry}

(Default margin is 1 inch.)

However, this will raise errors when compiling, because res and geometry both use an option named margin. As this post suggests, this can be resolved by changing the line (in res.cls)

\DeclareOption{margin}{\@margintrue}

to

\DeclareOption{resmargin}{\@margintrue}

and in your document

\documentclass[line,resmargin]{res}

Increase content size

Now, content will be positioned closer to the upper left corner, but still remain in the same box, i.e. produce more visual margin on the right/bottom. To resolve this, \textwidth and \textheight need to be adjusted.

They can be overridden by

\setlength{\textwidth}{6.1in}
\setlength{\textheight}{10in}

If this doesn't work, check if those values are overridden later in your file.

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