try setting \setlength\lineskip{0pt} i think you want this anyway and see what happens. in addition for testing i would not use dd measures but full pt's which makes spotting of offsets far more easy :-) perhaps this should be taken offline as this isn't really a l3 issue but a production problem with 2e i might be able to look into it a bit tonight (though not from this address) frank > And curiously in the resulting output the next line of text is offset by > ~0.4mm. that is roughly 1pt which is the default for \lineskip