> 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, [log in to unmask]