I’ve been writ­ing a grant appli­ca­tion with a 10-page limit, and as usual it is dif­fi­cult to squeeze every­thing in. No, I can’t just change the font as it has to be 12 point with at least 2 cm mar­gins on an A4 page. For­tu­nately, LaTeX is packed full of pow­er­ful fea­tures that help in squeez­ing it all in. Here are some of the tips I’ve used over the years.

Make your text block as big as pos­si­ble. The sim­plest way to do that is using the geom­e­try package:

\usepackage[text={16cm,24cm}]{geometry}

Use a com­pact font such as Times Roman:

\usepackage{mathptmx}

Remove the spac­ing between para­graphs and have a small para­graph indentation

\setlength{\parskip}{0cm}
\setlength{\parindent}{1em}

Remove space around sec­tion headings.

\usepackage[compact]{titlesec}
\titlespacing{\section}{0pt}{2ex}{1ex}
\titlespacing{\subsection}{0pt}{1ex}{0ex}
\titlespacing{\subsubsection}{0pt}{0.5ex}{0ex}

Beware of enu­mer­ated and item­ized lists. Instead, replace them with com­pact lists.

\usepackage{paralist}
\begin{compactitem}
\item ...
\end{compactitem}
\begin{compactenum}
\item ...
\end{compactenum}

If you are allowed, switch­ing to dou­ble col­umn can save heaps of space.

\usepackage{multicols}
\begin{multicols}{2}
...
\end{multicols}

If the rules say 12pt, you can usu­ally get away with 11.5pt with­out any­one noticing:

\begin{document}\fontsize{11.5}{14}\rm

When you get des­per­ate, you can squeeze the inter-line spac­ing using

\linespread{0.9}

There is also a savetrees pack­age which does a lot of squeez­ing, but the results don’t always look nice, so it is bet­ter to try one or more of the above tricks instead.

A few more tricks are explained here and here.

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