5 El diseño de la página

In this chapter we see how to specify different page layouts. Often a single document requires several different page layouts. For instance, the layout of the first page of a chapter, which carries the chapter title, is generally different from that of the other pages in that chapter.

We first introduce LaTEX’s dimensional parameters that influence the page layout and describe ways to change them and visualize their values. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of the packages typearea and geometry, both of which provide sophisticated ways to implement page layout specifications.

The third section deals with the LaTEX concepts used to provide data for running headers and footers. This section includes a description of the new mark mechanism introduced in LaTEX in 2022.

This is followed by a section that explains how to format such elements, including many examples deploying the fancyhdr package and others.

The fifth section then introduces commands that help in situations when the text does not fit into the layout and manual intervention is required. This includes advice and tools for manual pagination, which is sometimes necessary to avoid widows and orphans, avoid excessive white space, etc.

The chapter concludes with a brief look at two generic classes that go a long way toward providing almost full control over the page layout specification process.