Your line lengths seem pretty long; I would either narrow the column to 70–75 characters per line or split it into two ragged-right columns. Other than that it looks fine.

Or, if you want to keep the long lines (although they are not ideal), you could add some leading (space between the lines). This’ll make it easier for the reader to find his place when he comes to the end of a line. Try reading a printout yourself!

I agree that line lengths are too long.
Also, is there a reason for extending the image past the text margin on the inside? In addition to not aligning with the caption, that placement also makes me wonder if extending the image so near to the spine will make photocopying or scanning more difficult. (I'm an art historian and image placement that makes it impossible to sit that part of the page flat on a copier or scanner is a perennial frustration.)

@dunwich type, @frank: I agree the lines were too long; I tried to decrease the character number per line with Latex but it didn't work out as expected (some 2-3 characters less, plus lots of empty upper and outer margin space).

I decided to try out editing the whole thing in Word 2010 (took some time) to see how it would look like, and the result seemed very straightforward and acceptable -- althought I added space between paragraphs and used Myriad as a sans-serif.

@eliason: I hadn't paid attention yet to how images would fit when printed or photocopied, but your observation makes sense. There must be an obvious difference between home-made printing and books/magazines I hadn't noticed -- I always see images extending beyond the text margin.

Anyway, I made a new document just in case (I just hope I didn't screw it up and made it worse). You can find it here if you want to take a look.

Thanks a lot.

Old style figures would look decidedly more erudite.
With this layout, you should also find a way to differentiate the captions — e.g. smaller size, bold, or sans serif; at the moment, they read too much like the main text.

@Nick Shinn,

Thanks a lot for your advice.

I've change figures to old style and captions to sans-serif -- should I apply sans-serif to old style figures, too?

I also set paragraphs ragged right, without hyphenation, and with a space between paragaphs, single column, A4 paper (for class handout articles, for the journal I still have to find an appropriate size); margins 2,5 cm top/bottom and 3,0cm left/right; sans-serif Myriad Pro Bold 14pt; serif Kepler 11pt.

Are there any other changes I should/could make (or perhaps reverse to the previous version)?

I've change figures to old style and captions to sans-serif -- should I apply sans-serif to old style figures, too?

No. It's not crucial to have old style figures in your sans serif captions.
But it does make a difference to extended serif body copy.

>105-197 cm

I would change the hyphen/divis to an "×"; 105 × 197 cm (and add some space inbetween the numbers and the "×").

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>1873-74

Hmm, what is the convention to abbreviate year dates? Normally i would use a dash connecting the year dates; 1873 – 1874. But in your case? 1873 – -74 That looks wrong. Or how about; 1873/-74? Can somebody tell me the convention, or how to get around with this properly?

Hmm, what is the convention to abbreviate year dates? Normally i would use a dash connecting the year dates; 1873 – 1874. But in your case? 1873 – -74 That looks wrong. Or how about; 1873/-74? Can somebody tell me the convention, or how to get around with this properly?

In English, the normal convention would be 1873–74 as an abbreviation for 1873–1874 (en-dash, no spaces). I don't know what the standard practice is in Portuguese for numeric ranges. Both usage and spacing of punctuation vary a lot between countries.

@poms, you're right about the "x", I hadn't revised the text yet.
@archaica @poms, I just followed the English abbreviation; in fact I've never seen that king of abbreviation in Portuguese (although it makes sense and is understandable).