How To Change The Page Size on a LaTeX Page

LaTeX is a text markup language that makes it easy to create well structure documents. However, sometimes users can have little clue about changing some basic formatting properties of the document, including page size, location of text in the page, and figure positioning. In this article, I show a quick way to change the page size in a LaTeX document.

The page size in LaTeX is determined by a few parameters that can be easily changed. These control parameters are available through some common keywords that allow users to determine the exact dimensions of the page.

Document Level Changes

The main parameter used internally by LaTeX is called \textwidth. By modifying this parameter, one can change the width on a text on the whole page.

Changes to \textwidth are generally performed at the beginning of the document. The reason is that it is distracting to have a document with different text widths. Unless you have a special page, avoid using \textwidth on a local basis.

Changing the value of textwdith is really simple. Here is an example:

\textwidth 6.5in

This changes the value to 6.5 inches.

Local Changes

If your goal is to change the width of text for just a few lines, the preferred way to do it is using the \linewidth parameter.

With \linewidth one can control the size of lines for just a small part of the document. This is, for example, the approach used in Latex in some environments such as itemize, where the change will last only for the duration of the list.

Making changes the linewidth is similar to changes to textwidth. You can write:

\linewidth 6.0in

this will reduce the current with of lines to 6 inches.

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