[texhax] less gap text/display math when almost empty

Morten Høgholm moho01ab at student.cbs.dk
Sun Oct 3 12:54:06 CEST 2004


On Sun, 03 Oct 2004 12:10:09 +0100, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>  
wrote:

> I would be very surprised if LaTeX did not
> do what you want automatically : Knuth provided
> \abovedisplayshortskip for that very purpose,
> and it seems very unlikely (though not impossible)
> that Leslie Lamport et al would not have carried
> that functionality over into LaTeX.

Alexandru is not being very informative here but my best guess is that he  
is talking about the multi line display environments from Ams(La)TeX. They  
all insert \abovedisplayskip above every display and the reason is quite  
simple: they're all built on the structure

   $$
   \halign{...}
   $$

where TeX by nature puts the \halign flush left. Just last week I made  
some extensions to the amsmath code that solves the problem (using  
\predisplaysize, \displayindent, and a lot of the information stored by  
amsmath for it's typesetting phase). If these fixes become a part of the  
next major amsmath release it'll definitely be as an option as the  
backwards compatibility is gone... Guess I should mail them to the Ams  
soon then.

Cheers,
-- 
Morten Høgholm



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