[texhax] alignment of parbox and fbox (LaTeX vs. TeX)

Uwe Lück uwe.lueck at web.de
Mon Sep 14 20:24:49 CEST 2009


At 17:55 08.09.09, bill lam wrote:
>I learn latex by reading the book 'A Guide to Latex' by Kopka and Daly
>(the 1993 edition),  There are no \vphantom or \strut mentioned in that
>book.  I guess that are new commands introduced later.

At 18:39 08.09.09, hh wrote:
>earlier!

Expanding on hh, quite to the contrary: The basic idea of LaTeX has been to 
/hide/ major features of TeX from users in order not to trouble them too 
much. LaTeX2e provides \settodepth, \settoheight, \depth, \height (see 
LaTeX Companion Appendix on boxes like \raisebox), but it is not clear to 
me whether this was meant to explain the ideas of depth, height, reference 
point, vertical positioning of vertical boxes to a LaTeX audience. I think 
p. 63 of Knuth's TeXbook is the starting point for understanding these 
matters. As long as you don't understand the TeX engine behind LaTeX, you 
may be puzzled by LaTeX very often.

Did I help??? Anyway, I must stop here -- Uwe.



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