updates margins for twoside

[PatrickKinnear]

• Interchanges the oddsidemargin and evensidemargin parameters so that twosided documents are laid out according to the standard conventions for book printing.

Type of changes

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)

Background on the changes:

When creating a report with the twoside option, it is prepared to be printed two-sided and bound as a book. The standard for book binding is for odd pages to come on the right of a two-page spread, even pages on the left. Looking at a two-page spread, there should be three strips of vertical white space: a left margin on the left (even) page, a central margin, and a right margin on the right (odd) page. Ideally all three strips should be of a similar size.

The central margin is made up of the inner margins of the two pages of the spread. As such, the inner margin of each page should be about half the size of the outer margin. This requires a different convention for left/right margins on odd vs even pages.

The previous version placed a narrow margin at the outside of each page and a wide margin on the inside, resulting in a very unbalanced page layout. It's possible that the authors imagined a layout with odd pages on the left, which is the opposite of the standard convention. It's also possible they imagined the wider central margin accounted for binding space, but this should be set using the bindingoffset parameter of the geometry package.

Detail on changes:

The parameters responsible for the twoside page layout are oddsidemargin and evensidemargin. By interchanging these, we obtain a layout that conforms to widely accepted publishing conventions. Even after interchanging, the central margin is slightly wider than the outer margins, which should account for the small amount of paper that would be taken up by the types of bindings (glue binding) typical of a UoE thesis.

Previously there was a manual correction to the maketitle command to ensure the title page is centred. This has been adjusted so that even after the above changes the title page is still centred.

[Foggalong]

@PatrickKinnear This is excellent! I printed of a draft of my thesis for the first time last week and it came out with backward binding, so it had been on my to-do list to work out exactly what went wrong here.

Will do a proper review with some test documents I have later b/c I know there's a related issue where with some classes the margins switch sides between the preamble and main chapter content, and guessing that comes from this same spot. Thanks so much 😄

[adkbeckett]

Commenting here following a conversation with @PatrickKinnear elsewhere. The margins as they're currently set conform with the specifications of the UoE thesis printing service . The purpose is not to have wider inner margins than outer, but to leave space for physical binding, so the margins shouldn't be swapped as in this commit.
However, this page geometry does lead to a very awkward layout when the pages are viewed without binding. Patrick also pointed out that even with binding, this still gives unconventionally wide inner margins, although it looks okay. The actual visible margins should be set separately from the binding spacing. More generally, all of the dimensions should be set in a more transparent way, and they should be customisable for people who might want to use a different printing/ binding service or just want a version of it which looks good on-screen.
I did some work locally on page geometry a while ago which I apparently never got around to pushing to GH and including in a pull request which should make all this easier to handle, although more work is still needed. I'll try to update this tomorrow.

[PatrickKinnear]

Thanks for this Andrew! I think in light of this the PR I made above should be disregarded, but it would still be good to have a different solution which allows users to set visible margins and binding width separately, and also has something sensible as a default. Maybe @adkbeckett 's update will achieve this.

I did some work to create a dynamic page layout so I could have a "print" (offset margins for two-page spreads) or "digital" (totally centred for 1-up screen viewing) layout by specifying a keyword. It was a bit hacky but could look at contributing this, will see if it would mesh with what Andrew has made.