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Apologies: I want to violate the most basic prescriptions of sane typography. Have a bag ready. It's the lesser of evils.

Say, I have a book, with margins of 0.5 inches on the spine and 1 inch on the edge. I have a bunch of tabulars that may exceed the \textwidth, rarely more than 5em. I know I should break the tabulars, but this would be very difficult. (I do know I can already shrink the tabular horizontal spacing and the font sizing.)

The standard latex behavior is to push my (otherwise centered tabular) text over the right text edge. Instead, I would like to specify how strong my tabular that exceeds the textwidth should push left vs right into the odd-side and the even-side margins. For example, if I have 0.5 and 1 inch margins, I may want to push two points over the right margin for every point I push over the left margin. This would be on an odd-numbered page, with the opposite for an even numbered page.

This may be too much to ask for, but I can imagine that this could be of interest to more folks than just myself.

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  • 1
    For example package scrextend provides an environment addmargin that can be used. There are other packages with similar features. You also could use negative space, e.g., \hspace*{-1in} etc.
    – cabohah
    Commented Aug 2 at 13:20
  • There is also landscape and sidewaystable. While overlapping to the rught is the default, it also generates a warning (overfull \hbox). \makebox[\textwidth][c]{...} overlaps equally on both sides (no warning).
    – John Kormylo
    Commented Aug 2 at 13:39
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    changepage provides an environment which specifically does this (and also environments to change the page geometry more radically). obviously prefer scrextend if using a koma class, but changepage works well for me with standard classes.
    – cfr
    Commented Aug 2 at 13:40
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    @JohnKormylo \makebox will mean you won't get warnings however much it exceeds the width by and can't be used with long tabulars. changepage's environment I like because I'll still get those warnings etc.
    – cfr
    Commented Aug 2 at 13:42

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Just the last of these lines is over-full. The first three are centred in the text block, the later ones hang three times as much into the right margin as the left.

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand\x[1]{%
  {\parfillskip=0pt
    \par \noindent X\dotfill
    {\ttfamily\detokenize{#1}}%
    \dotfill X%
    \par\noindent\nobreak\hspace{0pt plus \textwidth minus 20pt}%
    \rule{#1}{2pt}%
    \nobreak\hspace{0pt plus \textwidth minus 60pt}\mbox{}\par}%
}

\begin{document}

\noindent X\dotfill X

\x{.5\textwidth}

\x{.9\textwidth}

\x{\textwidth}

\x{1.05\textwidth}

\x{1.1\textwidth}

\x{1.15\textwidth}

\x{1.2\textwidth}

\x{1.3\textwidth} % over full


\end{document}
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2
  • thx, as always. Can this be different for even and odd pages, to reach less into the spine?
    – ivo Welch
    Commented 14 mins ago
  • @ivoWelch well you can easily make the 20pt and 60pt \ifodd\value{page}20pt\else60pt\fi for one and \ifodd\value{page}60pt\else20pt\fi for the other although page value isn't guaranteed unless you are after a \clearpage` or you use some \label/\pageref` to get the real page number
    – David Carlisle
    Commented 3 mins ago

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