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From: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Making TeX leave blank space between headline and text
Message-ID: <8007@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 1 Aug 90 04:24:09 GMT
References: <7996@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
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Reply-To: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 59

In article <1990Aug1.023154.749@hayes.fai.alaska.edu>, wisner@hayes.fai.alaska.edu (Bill Wisner) writes...
>dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Don Hosek) writes:

>>The TeXbook, Chapter 23, is what you're most interested in.

>No it's not. I've looked at that section of the book (and a few
>others) until I got a headache. I'm not a TeX wizard; I'm an ordinary
>mortal trying to get something done. A concrete example of how to do
>what I want would be greatly appreciated. I can't believe that there
>isn't *someone* out there who has done it before.

OK, I'll grant that the TeXbook can be a little dense at times so
I'll try to rephrase how things work (actually, don't feel bad if
this is difficulty to understand; Knuth has a tendency to do
things in rather non-obvious ways).

Also, I suppose I could have pointed you at another interesting
passage as well, viz pp.113-114 of the TeXbook (it's really quite
a shame that plain TeX makes this sort of thing a dangerous-bend
item since it's so commonly useful).

Anyway, the amount of space between the header and first line of
space is determined partially by the value of \topskip and
partially by the amount of the \vskip in \makeheadline. The
following illustration should show the relation

    X       /
    |     8.5pt*
    |       \   Baseline of headline
 22.5pt                                                \
    |                                                  |
    |                                                  |
y=0_X_________________________________________________24pt_______
    /                                                  |
\topskip[10pt]                                         |
   \        Baseline of first line printed on the page /


Adjusting the top of the page can be done in two ways: The first
method is for you can change the \vskip -22.5pt to some smaller
number (larger if you think in absolute values) which will raise
the location of the headline. This is particularly valuable for
large headlines which will in fact be placed lower depending on
the height of their box. (Thus for example, a header set in some
large font might push the text closer to the body text; this is
best remedied by increasing the negative \vskip and the size of
the empty \vbox accordingly.) The second approach to changing the
spacing is to increase the value of \topskip which will push the
text further down upon the page (counting against the goal for
\vsize, incidentally). The traditional value for this is 1 em,
i.e., the design size of the body text.

-dh

---
Don Hosek                         TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and
dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu         production work. Free Estimates.
dhosek@ymir.bitnet                
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