[XeTeX] squeezing vertical space before/after verse environment

[John Was]

Hello

I don't use LaTeX but I've always found that it's best to specify the space round displayed matter as 'x minus y' (the maximum less some y) and not 'x plus y' (the minimum plus some y), since with the latter TeX will sometimes stretch it to a great (and unacceptable) amount if the pagination is falling awkwardly and that is the least-penalty way for it to complete the page.  Something like

\vskip 0.75\baselineskip minus 0.25\baselineskip

before and after the displayed matter should be OK. (You can put at the start something like

\def\verseskip{\vskip 0.75\baselineskip minus 0.25\baselineskip}

and then use \verseskip in your environment definition.  You can then tinker with the definition of \verseskip until everything looks nice.


Hope this helps.

John



----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Sreenivasa Guttal 
  To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
  Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 3:22 PM
  Subject: Re: [XeTeX] squeezing vertical space before/after verse environment


  Hello,


  I have defined new verse environment as below and it does seem to change. However, I am not able to reduce the verse begin and end space further. I tried to change listparindent. Please suggest.


  Thanks,
  Sreenivasa


  On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 2:15 PM, François Patte <francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr> wrote:

    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
    Hash: SHA1

    Le 02/08/2009 08:35, Sreenivasa Guttal a écrit :

    > Hello,
    >
    > I frequently get feedback to reduce the vertical space automatically
    > introduced by latex/xelatex in section headers etc. I have some solution
    > for section headers now, but could not do the same for verse
    > environment. If one looks @ the output, the space introduced by verse
    > before and after looks significantly more. My work used indian languages
    > like sanskrit.


    Build your own environment, for instance:

    \makeatletter
    \newenvironment{sutra}{%
    \refstepcounter{sutra}
                   \let\\\@centercr
                   \list{}{\itemsep      \z@
                           \itemindent   -1.5em%
                           \listparindent\itemindent
                           \advance\leftmargin 1em}%
                   \item\relax}
                  {\endlist}
    \makeatother

    Adjust the parameters until they fit what you wish.

    If you want your new environment to be still named "verse", use
    \renewenvironment (with the same syntax).


    - --
    François Patte
    UFR de mathématiques et informatique
    Université Paris Descartes
    45, rue des Saints Pères
    F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
    Tél. +33 (0)1 4286 2145
    http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
    Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
    Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

    iEYEARECAAYFAkp1Ug0ACgkQdE6C2dhV2JXymgCfUafwrRQTD3/1ZTb/97A/HRsa
    ihkAoI2jJ6HrV4ycL5XSq5WlJZArKthH
    =r8dl
    -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20090803/b7ef9555/attachment-0001.html>