Page Layout ⇒ Correcting page number locations in old class

[eskimo]

Greetings,

I am the maintainer of the LaTeX thesis classfor the University of New Mexico which has been hacked to bits for years. There is an issue that I can't seem to track down and I was hoping I could get some help from this community. I've attached the relevant files to compile in this message. The problem is that the position of the page number changes going through the frontmatter. The third page of the document, marked "iv", has the page number way lower than the others and I can't seem to figure out why. Thus, I turn to the Gurus. What part of the unmeethesis.cls file is causing this strange page number behavior and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance for your help!

Regards,

David

[kaiserkarl13]

This seems to be linked to all the changes to \headsep, \topmargin, and so forth, combined with including/not including certain environments. For example, if the copyright page is included, the spacing is different on the acknowledgments page! Modifying these lengths should generally be avoided; instead, using things like \null\vspace{1in} or some such if you don't like the precise placement. In your case, however, you really need to think about redefining \chapter so all those headings look exactly the same. You can use \chapter* in the frontmatter, or better yet, set \secnumdepth (a counter) to -1 until you encounter \mainmatter.

I would actually recommend starting over with a new document class that uses \LoadClass{report}; that way, all the benefits of the standard document classes are already loaded. This saves you the definitions of thepart, thechapter, font sizes, etc.; you just inherit those from the report class. You can then set the margins rather than manipulating things like \textheight (which shouldn't really ever change once the paper size is determined). You will need to redefine \maketitle to include the appropriate text, and redefine \@makechapterhead (and \@makeschapterhead) to match the appropriate headings for the Table of Contents, Acknowledgments, etc.: that way, the List of Figures, Table of Contents, Glossary, and all the chapter headings will match the style of the Acknowledgments.

My current university had an even clunkier document class that was floating around; it was really just a bunch of commands that did a few things, poorly, that were required, then left everything else as in whatever document class was used. I wrote one that inherited report over one weekend, and it was already an improvement. There are a lot of things the standard classes do, and making yours inherit them makes your class more maintainable. Since you already have hints about how a lot of the new environments will look from this class, you should have an easier time.