General ⇒ Stretching & spacing issues in long documents

[angelixd]

Hi everyone,

I'm writing some custom stylesheets for the rendering of print manuals for a whole bunch of content. I use a lot of minipages for display, so it results in a lot of pages which aren't completely full. Since LaTeX tries to maximize usage of the space, I end up with a pdf that has a lot of inconsistent spacing; as I'll have paragraphs that are very close apart on a tight page, and then lists with an inch of space between them, and all other discrepancies.

Is there a way to have LaTeX "flush" everything to the top of the page? My first inclination on how to do this would be to insert some sort of non-printing element (like a \vspace) at the end of every page with some sort of macro and have it prioritized so that it stretches the most, but I don't know how to do any of those things. My main problem here is putting a name to what it is i'm trying to do. can anyone give me some insight?