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Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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In-Reply-To:  "Your message of Wed, 16 Apr 97 10:29:11 +0200." 
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Date:         Wed, 16 Apr 1997 09:34:30 -0400
From: Michael Downes <mjd@MATH.AMS.ORG>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: Alternatives to LaTeX (Was Some comments...)
Status: R

> what bugs me more about LaTeX is the following, which has made me
> consider alternatives, since I think any decent typsetting program
> should offer it:
>
>                 a) the ability to typset lines to a grid

I don't see why this cannot be accomplished by proper settings of the
various vertical space parameters in the documentclass. I.e., I don't
think it is an inherent restriction in LaTeX, it is a decision left up
to the designer/documentclass writer.

However, I suppose that the design constraint that all vertical spacing
must be _integral_ multiples of the line spacing must make grid setting
rather unappealing to designers when they are working with anything but
the most homogeneous plain text material. For example, typesetting to a
grid generally produces risible results if the material contains
displayed equations. There are similar problems for other displayed
objects such as verbatim source code, diagrams, tables, etc., if the
spacing specs are nonintegral, unless the height of the objects
themselves is constrained to avoid problems. E.g., displayed verbatim
may be OK as long as you require that the verbatim text uses the same
line spacing as the main text (not one size smaller or larger ...).

If you allow vertical spacing around display objects to stretch to get
back to the grid for the next line after the object, then you get
glaringly inconsistent results when object A has height 3\baselineskip
and object B (following two or three lines later on the same page) has
height 3.1\baselineskip.

Michael Downes, mjd@ams.org