Hi. As Chris Rowley (from the latex-project.org) has suggested to me I'll sending my last two mails (seperately) to this list ... May be this is interesting for you (unfortunately I wasn't able to test the new OR because I first have to setup another TeX system that supports pdftex). In the book I'm recently working on there's material which needs special treatment so that the main text aligns on a baseline grid. For most of the material I've solved this more or less quick and dirty. But now I'm facing a new problem which I wasn't able to solve: Headings and grid alignment! Headings with one line, two, or even three lines and in a different type size (and leading) than the body type. One point is the problematic \topskip. It's always difficult to align some special material "on top", say in a two column document together with text. May be it would be helpful if -- and what is in the AFM files -- to incorporate the ascender/cap height into the TFM (and let TeX know about that), so that one could align special material with respect to the ascender/cap heigth. The other point is -- when I was trying to solve the heading problem -- that if I put the heading inside a box to measure it (and calculating the n+1 baseline skips at least needed) it seems that the following material "sticks" with its top at the bottom of the heading box. Probably I haven't understood the mechanism correctly. Do you have an idea what could be the right direction to solve this problem? Regards, Ulrich Postscriptum: I solved the heading problem again quick and dirty! The main point is that I put the material on the page via PSTricks's \rput which don't use any space and where I can control placement (like [Bl] for "baseline left" alignment (probably the same as with \vbox to0pt?)). I put the material into a \vbox measure it, divide it by \baselineskip, add an additional line, and finally instruct a \vspace command to put this calculated space. But it works only if after the heading "normal" text is typeset. If e.g. a minipage environment follows (for example to typeset a special formatted motto together with a picture in EPS format; though I've tried to use an exact height of n\baselineskip together with the [s] parameter and stretchable space inside) then everything gets wrong again ... BTW if lettrine.sty is used to typeset an initial one has to manually compensate the parameter "loversize" with negative \vspace; this is not the case for xinitials(!). -- Art & Satz Ulrich Dirr Arnimstraße 9 81369 München Germany/Deutschland -- fon (+49 89) 743 30 60 fax (+49 89) 743 30 61 email [log in to unmask] -- -=*:-)