[texhax] how to use \pagefillstretch and its relatives

Stan texforeverything at att.net
Wed Apr 20 02:26:08 CEST 2011


On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 15:49:00 -0500, Donald Arseneau <asnd at triumf.ca> wrote:

> Stan <texforeverything at att.net> writes:
>
>> I'm trying to set up some macros that will print a full version and an
>> incomplete version of a document.  The incomplete version doesn't have  
>> all
>> of the material in the full version, but it should insert the right  
>> amount
>> of vertical skip so the incomplete version's stuff lines up with the
>> corresponding stuff in the full version.
>
> Why not just change color to white?  Or is this to keep people
> from extracting content from an electronic copy?

That's part of it, yes.  It also seems "cleaner" to put a skip there  
instead of invisible text.

>
>> I set up the macros so the difference in \pagetotal, \pageshrink, and
>> \pagestretch between each skipped block are written to a file that's
>> imported into the incomplete version and used to determine how much  
>> skip  to
>> insert.  I'm not getting the information from the stretches that I  
>> want  when
>> there's infinite stretching in a block that should be skipped in the
>> incomplete version.  (I tried including \pagefilstretch etc.  
>> separately,  but
>> that didn't help.)
>>
>> This would work nicely if, for example, the value of \pagefillstretch  
>> were
>> "1" after an occurrence of \vfill (to indicate that 1 unit of  
>> second-order
>> infinite stretch has been inserted), but since they're all dimensions, I
>> need a way to write the dimension they take on after the page is ready  
>> to  be
>> shipped out.  Is there any way of doing that (or an easier way of   
>> achieving
>> the same goal)?
>
> I thought this might be confusing you!  \pagefillstretch IS INDEED
> "1" after an occurrence of \vfill, but it is "1pt".  All you need
> to do is convert the "pt" to the corresponding filllllllevel.
>

Excellent!  Thank you.  Is there a nice way to assign that number to a  
control sequence (without the trailing "pt")?


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