Adding binding offsets for printing in Latex, the easy way

After completing my thesis, I needed to add binding offsets for printing. When I wrote my thesis, it was examined electronically and submitted as a PDF file. When you are preparing documents in this way, the margins are typically balanced on the left and right pages so that the content appears centrally on the page. However, when you print the document, about 5mm of the page is lost in the spine, so to remedy this, a binding offset is added to account for this loss.

In Latex, the geometry package allows this to be added really easily:

\usepackage[bindingoffset=5mm]{geometry}

However, adding this binding offset changes the width of the content pane (reducing it by 5mm), which causes things like my tikz figures and carefully crafted line endings (avoiding runts and widows etc) to all break and add a number of spurious line breaks and page overflows.

Instead, the easiest thing to do is to take the pdf file (thesis.pdf) and leave a 5mm offset when adding it into the page. Use the frame=true to show where the border is added. This fixes things without changing the width of the content frame.

\documentclass[a4paper, twoside]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{geometry}

\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-,fitpaper=true, offset=5mm 0mm,frame=false]{thesis.pdf}
\end{document}

Easy