axel's dev corner

When using calssicthesis most of the defaults look good and are there for a typographical, aesthetical or arbitrary reason. Some people immediately want turn on dottedtoc for instance.

I had a very different concern. The package uses a rather wide margin, in order to place nice marginpars thruout the text. Thats fine by me, it also allows for a nice small text layout without resorting to multiple columns. I did not like this for the typesetting of figures, especially large figures spanning a whole page or the top half thereof. So, I ventured out to change this. After some searching I came across the neat changepage package, which most of all allows for save determination of even and odd pages. With this, it was fairly straightforward to implement. I chose to provide a widefigure environment to typeset full-width figures with [p] or [t].

% wider floats by use of changepage. 
% see changepage documentation for details on the underlying quirks
\usepackage[strict]{changepage}  
% calculate size of margin to use
\newlength\totalmargin
\setlength\totalmargin\marginparwidth
\addtolength\totalmargin\marginparsep
% layout using the full margin as well
\newenvironment{layoutfullwidth}{%
\checkoddpage%
\ifoddpage%
\begin{adjustwidth}{0pt}{-\totalmargin}
\else%
\begin{adjustwidth}{-\totalmargin}{0pt}
\fi%
% advance textwidth for use in float,
% e.g. includegraphics[width=\textwidth]
\advance\textwidth\totalmargin
}{%
\end{adjustwidth}
}
% new, wider figure to use where wanted.
% note that the caption will be layouted wide as well.
\newenvironment{widefigure}[1][!tpb]{%
\begin{figure}[#1] 
\begin{layoutfullwidth}
}{
\end{layoutfullwidth}
\end{figure}

This is a straightforeward way of doing it, changing the typesetting of all floats in general requires some really ugly plain TeX hacking. I got it to work out of playful ambition but decided against using it in order to keep the code clean and understandable.