----- Original Message ----- From: "Lars Hellström" <[log in to unmask]> To: "Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L" <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 4:29 PM Subject: Re: templates for page layout > >What is the > >difference between text height and main galley height? > > The text height and width are the side lengths of the text rectangle, in > which all the non-marginal text should appear. In traditional book design, > the size and position of this rectangle is one of the very first things you > determine. The main galley height, or \vsize, is by contrast a parameter > for TeX's page builder: the wanted height of the main vertical list > material that is will be sent to the output routine in \box255. Current > LaTeX makes no difference between these two concepts, but I think LaTeX2e* > should. The main galley height is subject to various technical restrictions > (when you're not \sloppy and the page hardly has any stretchability then > you want it to be a multiple of the \baselineskip _plus_ one \topskip), but > the right way to manage that is not to leave it as restrictions on the > basic layout, instead it should be handled by some more technical set of > templates which might for example round it as necessary. I think you should keep in mind the traditional meaning of the main galley. And a clear distinction between design concepts (parameters for book design) and typesetting (here: parameters for breaking the galley into pages) should be made. May be this could direct the view not only to one page or page spread ... > >In my templates > >text height is the height of the text block without page head and foot but > >including footnotes and floats. > > That's the way the current output routine does it, yes, but it is not the > way it should be done. E.g. a headings pagestyle page head is visually part > of the text rectangle and therefore its height should be included in the > \textheight parameter. Another thing which should be included in > \textheight is the (expected) depth of the page box; I doubt anyone would > want to claim that the descenders on the last line of a page are outside > the text rectangle, but that is how the current output routine puts them. > The page builder ignores the depth when it determines the page break. > > One interesting advantage of putting the page head and foot logically > inside the text rectangle is that one can (to some extent) ensure the main > galley height satsifies the multiple-of-\baselineskip restriction by > modifying the \headsep and \footsep. In most designs there is probably a > range of acceptable values available. For book design an empty running head or a footer with only the page count isn't part of the text corpus. But in other designs header and footers could be regarded part of. On the other hand they are completely (usually) uninteresting for typesetting the main body. Ulrich Dirr -- 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] -- -=*:-)