Page Margins for the Rest of Us

I am not a designer. Hence I don’t like to make artisitic decisions. Recently I had to make a document and I started to ask myself, what are the standard margins for the text block. I can just eye them out, but this never fullfills me. Here comes two days of research.

Basically there are two traditional methods: Van de Graaf and Villard de Honnecourt. Both are based on some golden section and paper size relationship. As one might notice, the drawing, while not too complicated, yet complex enough to remove any desire to reproduce it. I want digits.