Page Layout ⇒ footer bigger than stated in the preamble

[gosha]

I've been googleing a lot, but cannot find the answer to this specific question.
I want to keep the right and left margin as latex default, but want to change the top and bottom ones, just to save a little paper since it's for personal use.
This is the relevant part of the preamble:

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\usepackage{fullpage}
\pagestyle{empty}
\usepackage[top=2.5cm,bottom=2.5cm,nohead,nofoot]{geometry}

and in the \documentclass I have chosen a4paper, so the paper size is right.

But then, for example, I have a page where the top margin is 2.5cm, but the bottom one is 4cm, but next page you have four words ending the paragraph. Why does not Latex put them in the previous page having 1.5 cm free to use?

[localghost]

At first, abandon the fullpage package. It is superfluous when using geometry. The following code works fine for me.

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\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[noheadfoot,top=2.5cm,bottom=2.5cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
  \pagestyle{empty}
  \Blinddocument
\end{document}

The behaviour you described is known as "Widows and Orphans" [1]. You can avoid them by adding some lines to the preamble.

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% Avoid Widows and Orphans
\clubpenalty10000
\widowpenalty10000
\displaywidowpenalty10000

This should prevent their appearance completely.

[1] Widows and orphans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Best regards
Thorsten

[gosha]

thanks a lot, this seems to do the trick:

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%Avoid Widows and Orphans
\clubpenalty10000
\widowpenalty10000
\displaywidowpenalty10000

but are these values kind of standard? Will they work always with different texts?

Also, I cannot grasp the use of the blindtext package, it gives me a quite unpredictable output.

[localghost]

thanks a lot, this seems to do the trick: […] but are these values kind of standard? Will they work always with different texts?

If they were, you wouldn't face the phenomenon you described. As far as I know each of these parameters has 150 as default value. The new values should work with every document.

[…] Also, I cannot grasp the use of the blindtext package, it gives me a quite unpredictable output.

This is a very vague statement. You should specify the problem. The blindtext package only works with English and German output and it needs a preloaded babel with the appropriate language option. If you expect another language, it will disappoint you.

[gosha]

oh, no wonder! I have a file in Italian.
tks