Message-Id: <199402171348.AA07240@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX2e Betatest <LATEX-2E@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Thu, 17 Feb 1994 11:31:41 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@SHEFFIELD.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX2e Betatest <LATEX-2E@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-2E <LATEX-2E@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Query about \textheight computation
Status: R

From:          "Johannes L. Braams" <J.L.Braams@RESEARCH.PTT.NL>

%>    Let me say this about this subject: the layout parameters are not
%>    finalised yet, we still have plans to change some of them. The
%>    value of 1.5 inch is a left over from the time when I was working
%>    on it and needed a quick solution to get something halfway decent.
%>    That may most certainly be changed.
%>
%>    We still want to compute the textheight such that a whole number
%>    of baselineskips fits in the the textheight area.

Johannes,

I am puzzled by this. Why is it necessary for the textheight to be a whole
number of baseline skips?

(a) Maths in any line(s) distorts the layout of lines so much that you don't
get the same number of lines from page to page.

(b) Changing to a smaller font with \small has the same effect. There is also
the problem of what happens on title pages, pages with section headings, etc,
in fact on *most* pages, where different sizes of text appear on the same
page.

(c) Even given that everything should be determined by the base font
size, changing to a different font family, where the heights of the letters
are different, and so presumably the baselineskips are different, would force
a change of text area. Thus the document class file would have to know in
advance what *font family* was to be used.

%>    We also want to
%>    compute those values to support several papersizes. W

I definitely agree with this one, but under what assumptions? One has to
specify which are the independent and which are the dependent variables. I
take it that you would specify paper width, paper height and font size as
independent variables, ie, options for size of paper and size of base font.
But is it em, ex or baseline skip that determines vertical spacing to do with
the gap between headers and text, etc? If we limit the width according to the
dimensions of the base font family, then this has to be known in advance.

But even if we want a book to look perfectly proportioned when it finally
appears, most of the time we are going to be looking at drafts with as much
as possible on an A4 sheet (or whatever).

And also, later use of the multicolumn package with say three columns might
completely negate any calculations made earlier about width of lines being
no more than 70 or so characters.


Mike

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%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
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