Text Formatting ⇒ baselineskip?

[LaTexLearner]

What is the "baselineskip" part for in the \vspace command?

[Johannes_B]

\baselineskip is a length, the space from one baseline to the next. The baseline is the imaginary length, that the letters sit on. Some letters, like g and y descend the baseline. A picture that give some visual aid can be found in the german wikipedia, Zeilenabstand.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

And by the way, you can also use a factor, such as

\vspace{2\baselineskip}

for skipping two lines, or

\vspace{.5\baselineskip}

for skipping half of a line. Of course it respects font size, which determines the line height, so it automatically scales when you change the font size.

Furthermore, at the beginning and at the end of a page, this space would be omitted, since it's mainly a distance between elements. That's usually desired. The starred version \vspace* produces the space also at page start or end, such as for a specific fixed page design.

Stefan

[Johannes_B]

A few more things on spacing, that i wanted to add to the above post, but Stefan already posted some more detail.

The following example includes some snippets concerning linespacing and fontsize, which correspond as already mentioned. I already covered parts of this in another answer of me, that was also covering parts of the [/url=http://latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=89372#p89372]latest macro question[/url].

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{printlen}
\uselengthunit{pt}
\makeatletter
\newcommand{\showdetail}{%
	current \texttt{baselineskip}: \printlength{\baselineskip}
	current \texttt{fontsize}: \f@size pt}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\blindtext\showdetail

texte {\Huge ogee, text \showdetail} text

{\Huge Some more text which should at least yield two different
lines of text \par\showdetail}


\clearpage
{\fontsize{12}{15}\selectfont \blindtext more text \showdetail\par}
\end{document}