How to make a document occupy more pages?
These are some additional ideas, assuming that you do not need to abide by a standard layout.
- Use something like the tufte-book class (it has a very wide right margin, you can make it a bit wider as well) and it still looks good.
- Have full page epigraphs to separate chapters from other text and possible full page pictures. (Tufte does that at the beginning of his books).
- Index almost any word you can think of.
- KILL justification. All the document must be typeset ragged right.
- Adjust lists and all vertical spacing.
- Increase the interword spacing.
- Increase the spacing after stops.
- Have all sectioning at larger sized fonts.
- Section the document down to paragraph (and modify) the sectioning command to start on a new line rather than as a block.
- Use toc levels 7
- Input chapter 3 again as the chapter before last and if anyone notices blame it on the typographical devil or the TeX engine.
- If you have any computer code, include it as an appendix
- Have a colophon explaining the use of LaTeX to typeset the thesis and import the source and the log as a listing.
Not yet mentioned has been the role of choosing the "right" font:
- Choose a wide, but still aesthetically pleasant font (CM is pretty narrow). In my experience this can extend the number of pages by up to 20 percent. Take a look at The LaTeX Font Catalogue.
- Do not use
microtype
, as its better spacing often reduces the number of pages (around five to ten percent).
Some additional ideas:
Replace inline lists of thoughts -- especially those in which each item contains only a handful of words -- with bulleted and/or numbered lists.
Use nested
itemize
environments to further break down lists of any length into sub-lists.This also applies to
enumerate
environments.
Increase the left- and right-hand indents of "bulleted" and numbered lists as well as the offset between the "bullet"/number and the hanging paragraph.
Increase the indentation of the first lines of each paragraph, e.g., with
\setlength\parindent{2.5em} % you don't want your deviousness to be too obvious...
and also increase the spacing between paragraphs, e.g., with
\setlength\parskip{1.5\baselineskip}