[texhax] Controlling line spacing in footnotes with plain TeX

[Oleg Katsitadze]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 05:45:03PM -0600, D. R. Evans wrote:
> 2. However, if I set it to (say) 10pt, the distance between the first pair
> of lines in the footnote is visibly less than the distance between the
> second pair.

This is because plain TeX (and, I assume, your macros) insert \strut
on the last line of the footnote, to make spacing between consecutive
footnotes consistent.  You've changed \baselineskip and font size, but
haven't changed \strut's definition.  So you get a default \strut
suitable for the default \baselineskip and default font size.  So, set
up \strut accordingly, probably in your \rmfnote macro.

>   \baselineskip=10pt
>   \lineskip=10pt
> 
> ----
> 
> But that just made things worse (for reasons I don't understand at all).
> Now  the distance between lines 1 and 2 of the footnote looks reasonable,
> but the distance between lines 2 and 3 is huge.

I think you misunderstand the meaning of \lineskip -- it is not
distance between base lines, it is glue inserted between two lines.
This means you'll get 10pt of space before the last footnote line,
which contains a \strut and therefore triggers the \lineskiplimit
case.

HTH,
Oleg