[texhax] memoir page head confusion

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 26 May 2009 Philip TAYLOR wrote:

 > You probably need a \leavevmode ...

It's better to use an \mbox here and a LaTeX equivalent for
\llap{\thepage\hskip 6pt}.  Though it's often more convenient for
people who are more familiar with plain TeX than with LaTeX to use
plain TeX macros or primitives directly, it's quite dangerous though.

Especially boxes are critical.  The LaTeX boxes contain some hooks
used by the color package.  If you use plain TeX code instead, you
don't see any problems immediately, but it might bite you later.

Another issue is hyperref.  It re-defines plenty of LaTeX macros.  If
you use your own macros, you'll certainly lose some of hyperref's
functionality.

Thus, if you want to use plain TeX code in LaTeX, you have to know
a lot about LaTeX's internals.  But there are some things in LaTeX2e
which are very sophisticated and it doesn't make much fun to
reverse-engineer the source code.

 > \vskip 2\baselineskip plus 1\baselineskip minus 1\baselineskip

Hmm, I'm not sure whether it's worthwhile to invest too much time into
these things because too much stretching is not desirable.  The result
will be ugly.  I doubt that you can get good page breaks without
manual interaction.  At least if you are interested in pleasing
results.

Of course, it's desirable to avoid page breaks in paragraphs and to
keep a question and the associated answer on the same page.  But I
doubt that it's possible at all if you have good typography in mind.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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