So your advisor just told you he doesn't understand why you have this ugly ultra wide margin on the left, and he can't read what your writing because the font is too small, and he wants you to change it if he's going to give you the go ahead to defend! After 3 nights of going through all the styles SWP offers and not finding one that fits all the requirements you have, you are about to cry and drop out of your Ph.D. program. Alas, here's a quick and dirty guide that answers many questions about how to get SWP to make documents the way you want them. This is NOT a guide on how to do stuff properly, but more of a cheat sheet on how to get quick results. Of course, in a perfect world none of this would be necessary since we would all write Shell files that would specify everything we want in a document. However, most of us won't do this because: (a) we are to lazy to learn how, (b) the deadline to submit our paper to that conference is tomorrow and we don't have time to learn how, or (c) put your own reason here. Naturally, none of these methods come with any guarantee. If you must ask us a question, send them by snail mail accompanied by a check for $1000 and we will look into your query but we make no promise we'll send you an answer. If there are problems to which you can't find the solution here, we suggest you go to MacKichan's website or to the Scientific Workplace User Forum. On the other hand, if you have comments/suggestions/additions, write to either or both of us: David or Guillaume. Note that we both use SWP 3.00, hence some of what we write here might not work with your version.
Here you have 2 choices (maybe more, but these are the ones we know of), both are rather simple.
Here you have multiple choices. Here are 4:
Unlike the typical word processing program where you choose the margin size
and the text fills the remaining area, with LaTex you specify the size of the
available text area and the rest will be margins. The trick is to set the
margins how you want them for each side. For example, for an 8.5 x 11 paper
choosing text size of 6.5 x 9 will allow for 2 inches worth of margins, but will
not necessarily give you 1 inch margins on each side and top and bottom. The
default for articles seems to be a text area of 4.75 x 7.50 centered, which
coincides with right and left margins of 1 7/8 and top and bottom margins of 1
3/4. Here are the commands which you can place in the preamble that come in
handy:
\setlength{\textwidth}{6.5in}
\setlength{\textheight}{9in}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0in} sets the left margin to 1 inch. The
right margin will depend on what you have choosen for textwidth.
\setlength{\topmargin}{0in} sets the top margin to 1 inch. Actually you
will still get 1.5 inch top margin because of space reserved for the header and
the space between the header and body text. You can get rid of the extra half
inch by choosing topmargin of -.5 inch or using the following commands
\setlength{\headheight}{0in} to set the height of every page's header to
0
\setlength{\headsep}{0in} to set the header-bodytext distance to 0
This very easy, you go to http://www.sba.muohio.edu/hinelidr/makepdf.htm and read David's how to guide. Alternatively, you can read Philip Viton's Automating PDF Production with SWP.
Back to topNow this seems trivial, but I don't know how many papers out there (definitely too many) have closing quotation marks to both open and close quotes. The key for the opening quotation marks is NOT the key to the left of the Enter key with '' on top and ' at the bottom. Rather you have to hit -- twice -- the key at the top left of your keyboard (not the Esc key silly, the one with a ~ on top and a ` on the bottom). Alternatively, if you don't get enough exercise and you think the way back to a 32 inch waist is to roll that mouse around, you can also get to it through the General Punctuation toolbar.
Back to topAs for now we have two shells. The first one is a shell to submit articles to any journal affiliated with the American Political Science Association (APSA) which includes the American Political Science Review (APSR). The second one is a shell to writte a thesis at Ohio State University (OSU).
When creating tables it is important (for typesetting purposes) always to use the table4_3 fragment. Put your cursor where you want the table, and either select File/Import Fragment then select the table4_3.frg file or go to the fragment scroll down menu (bottom right of your screen) and select table4_3. Then either fill in the sample table that appeared or replace it with the table you want.
This requires a few steps, but might save you a lot of time.
Hummm, have you considered changing careers, we promise you that a career as a pottery artist seems much more attractive right now. Forget about it. What you insist? Forget about it we told you, you can't do it. What? You don't believe us! OK, OK, there is a legend, that somehow, its possible to print landscape tables using MiKTeX, but we were both too lazy to try, so we don't know how, and if, it works.
Now this is strange, suppose you want to add/insert rows or columns in a table, where would you go? Don't say Insert because that's the wrong answer! Go to Edit and at the bottom you'll see the options to insert rows or columns.
It is not clear when we'll have time, but we are planning on adding stuff to this page. In no particular order, here are some of the things we plan to add:
Created on ... March 25, 2002