Bottom margin vs. descenders question

[Axel E. Retif]

On 7/6/20 5:57 AM, Philip Taylor wrote:

> Axel, I do not understand your suggestion.  Doug has stated how he 
> places a ruler at exactly one inch from the bottom of an American 
> letter-sized (8.5 x 11) document, as required by the forthcoming
> book's publisher.  I do not understand how the documentation of one
> or two TeX packages is in any way relevant.

You're right in that in my suggestions I focused in solutions available 
in (La)TeX (but also in QuarkXPress and InDesign), and forgot about 
Word, with which I don't know how to achieve those.


> There is no suggestion that contributors to this book are required to
> work in TeX [1], let alone required to use the "geometry" and/or
> "memoir" packages, so how does their behaviour in any way affect
> Doug's task ?

But here is different. My suggestion to read the documentation of the 
geometry package is because it deals with page layout in a very 
illustrative manner.

As for the few pages of the documentation of the memoir class I 
suggested, let me say first that I haven't even used that class at all, 
but said documentation is a master class in typography and book design 
---you don't have to use the class to profit a lot from reading it. 
Chapter Two, «Laying out the page», for example, deals more in depth in 
page design than the geometry package, but can be more intimidating.

The few pages of «Terminology» deal with something which for me is 
fundamental to solve the issues Doug McKenna is facing:

I don't think one can achieve what McKenna needs unless you make a 
couple of templates (LaTeX and Word) with the same font family, and the 
same font size and baselineskip, and then, when you have achieve the 
text box size and margins you're looking for, send those templates to 
the authors and ask them to use them unmodified.


Best

Axel