LaTeX Cookbook

Visualizing the layout

At the time of designing a document, one may like to have an exact view of the dimensions and position of the text body, the header and footer, and the space for the margin notes. LaTeX can print help lines for you so you can examine the layout and use it to position extra elements.

How to do it...

Load the showframe package. This means the following steps:

1. Open your document or a sample for testing. Here, we will use the very first document from Chapter 1, The Variety of Document Types.
2. Add the following line at the end of your preamble:

   \usepackage{showframe}

3. Compile the document. You will see frames around text body, margin note area, and header and footer:
4. Examining the layout can give you ideas about making adjustments, such ...