[texhax] Set depth to zero

[Rodolfo Medina]

David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle at gmail.com> writes:

> On 11 July 2018 at 20:33, Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.medina at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk> writes:
>>
>>> Rodolfo Medina wrote:
>>
>>>> I wish, in a particular text, to set to zero all the depths of all the
>>>> boxes of all alphabetical characters, so that, e.g., the letter `g' were a
>>>> box of depth zero just as the letter `h'...  I tried with \boxmaxdepth=0pt
>>>> but nothing...  Is it possibile to do that and how...?  I want to do so
>>>> because I want to completely stick-squash any line onto the line below...
>>>
>>> I don't know what "to completely stick-squash any line onto the line below"
>>> means, but when I want to /ignore/ the depth of lines I tweak \lineskip &
>>> \lineskiplimit.
>>
>>
>> Fine...!  What I want seems to be done with:
>>
>> \def\sticksquashlines{\baselineskip0pt\lineskip-2pt\lineskiplimit0pt}
>
>
> Are you _sure_ you want that setting???? You will get completely
> uneven line spacing, lines with capital or accented letters with
> larger baseline to baseline spacing than lines that do not.


You are right.  I hadn't seen the effect with lines without capital letters,
such as:

mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma
mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma
mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma mamma


It seems to me that it's not possible to achieve what I was asking (well, just
an experiment...), i.e. nullify the depth of text lines; or, in other words,
set \baselineskip to the mere `height' of lines: height, without their depth,
that's zero for `a', `m', and not zero for `g', `p', etc...  In that case, the
valour of \baselineskip should be different for different lines, with or
without capital letters in them...  and equal to the line height that's
variable.  It doesn't seem that TeX has a way to do that...

Rodolfo