Descender frequency question

[Doug McKenna]

All -

Thanks for the info.

The reason I asked is because I have written a format-checking, MacOS app that reads in PDF files (conference proceedings papers), built with either LaTeX or Word.  The app digitizes the page images and analyzes the 1pt x 1pt pixels, trying to understand where certain parts of the document are (e.g., title, author, margins, etc.).  Doing so requires analyzing where white space is distributed vertically.

I'm writing an OCR-like algorithm makes certain decisions based on a statistical analysis of descenders and their pixels in order to find the baselines of text.

A related question I have is this: Does LaTeX always used a fixed amount of vertical space between the bottom line of a \title{}, and the top of the first line of the \author{}?  Or does LaTeX stretch things out based on later (or any) text on the page?  If fixed, what is the amount of vertical space it uses?

Doug McKenna