Bottom margin vs. descenders question

[Peter Wilson]

During the many centuries that documents were printed from lead type the 
base of a line of type was the vertical position of the bottom of the 
characters a, b, c, etc. Some characters such as p, q, and y, have 
descenders which descend below the bottom of the a, b, c, characters.

The tradition is that descenders extend below the type baseline.

If some wish to go against centuries of experience then so be it but do 
not try and impose their views on others.

Peter W.

PS. The <<Terminology>> chapter in the memoir manual that Axel referred 
to has nothing to do with using the memoir class. It is a quick overview 
of some of the terminology used when describing a particular document. 
For instance it says that a 10pt font with 11pt leading on a 20pc 
measure is described as 10/11 x 20.


On 06/07/20 11:57, 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. 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 ?
>
> Philip Taylor
>
> [1] "The motivation for it is [that Doug has] been building a custom 
> program that helps vet formatting violations for paper submissions for 
> a conference and its eventual proceedings in book form.  All 
> submissions are PDF, but a significant number are not created using 
> LaTeX (Word usually).  There's no access to the original LaTeX source 
> or Word file, which remains in authors' hands.  So the editors have to 
> inform authors of all the problems and get them to fix them before 
> resubmitting."
> --------
> Axel E. Retif wrote:
>
>
>> On 7/5/20 3:23 PM, Doug McKenna wrote:
>>
>>
>>> The bottom margin is not based on a multiple of \baselineskip or
>>> similar.  It is based on measuring 720 pixels down from the top of an
>>> 8.5" by 11" inch PDF page in PostScript coords (72/inch), to get to
>>> the bottom 1" margin.
>>
>> I strongly advise you to read the documentation of the excellent 
>> geometry package:
>>
>>     texdoc geometry
>>
>> in your terminal. The actual manual is about 18 pages long, the rest 
>> is the «Implementation».
>>
>> Also, at least the very short chapter «Terminology» of the memoir class:
>>
>>     texdoc memoir.
>
>
>
>