[texhax] Strange formatting.

[c.a.rowley at open.ac.uk]

Tom

>> no, not a bug, but a knuth design
>> decision.
And hence, as ever, somewhat unintuitive 
(unless you want to look as deeply as Knuth 
and Robin into the use of text as a sequence 
of commands and the power of the empty line!).

But then putting \Huge anywhere into a text 
stream is also, these days, bizarre and unusual 
punishment (of text and intuition).
 
But it all made sense 30 years ago so don't
worry about it ...except that it is likely 
to last 50 or more years ... says the oracle!

Have fun,  chris


  it's not specific to latex.

the explanation is buried in chapter 14
of the texbook, "how tex breaks paragraphs
into lines".  on p.94, bottom, we are told
that "before the lines have been broken,
a paragraph inside of tex is actually a
horizontal list, ..."  that doesn't explain
directly why the baselines are reset when
the type size changes in the middle of a
paragraph, but it does inform us that the
paragraph isn't actually set line by line
(as done by most word processing programs)
but all at once, when tex detects the end
of the paragraph.

sorry, i haven't time to dig up a reference
with an example of size changes, but i'm
pretty sure there's one there somewhere.
    	    	    	    	    	    	-- bb
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