[Tex/LaTex] Confused with TeX terminology: height, depth, width

boxesdimensionsstruttex-core

The LaTeX reference card states for example

\strut box w/ ht and depth of “(”, zero width

I came to see text as a two dimensional feature, but I must be missing out on something…

(following was off-topic: by the way, im trying to find documentation on how to use \vbox, \hbox,… i.e. to align a hbox within a vbox to the right)

Best Answer

I made the following diagram for the adjustbox bundle. It will be part of the trimclip manual (The trimclip package will be an extracted part of the current adjustbox package).

Box

As you can see the text lies on the baseline, the height is everything above it and the depth everything below it. Usually only some lower-case character and punctuation go below it. Both together is the totalheight. Note that the coordinate system for the depth is going down, i.e. it is always positive. The width is the normal width of the content.

The macros in the document show how to access these values in LaTeX macros like \raisebox (first line) or with a TeX box register called \br here (second line).

There are further diagram which explain the trimming and clipping of boxes. The current work-in-progress version of the manual with this diagrams can be downloaded as PDF from the code repository. The source code for this and all other diagrams are also available.

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[Tex/LaTex] How to (temporarily) cancel centering

The package ragged2e provides enhanced versions of \centering, \raggedright and \raggedleft (that you may or may not like), but above all makes available the command

\justifying

that undoes the above declarations.

[Tex/LaTex] Why is `\strut` working in these scenarios

From the comments on the on the other answers, it seems like you want to concentrate on

 \leavevmode\strut\vadjust{%
    \noindent
    \raisebox{\dp\strutbox}[0pt][0pt]{\makebox[0pt][r]{Hello}}
  }%

The first \leavevmode isn't really needed as \strut is defined to get into horizontal mode, however it does no harm and makes it clearer that the code needs horizontal mode. Then comes the \strut this is important and we'll come back to that. Then \vadjust: the content of \vadjust is evaluated immediately (like \vbox) but the resulting vertical material is not boxed but inserted into the vertical list that will be later constructed from the lines in the paragraph.

The intention of the code is to make hello aligned to the baseline of the previous box, but the vadjust material is inserted directly into the list not forced to baseline spacing so to align to the baseline of the previous box you need to back up by the depth of the previous box. the "previous box" has not yet been constructed, it consists of whatever text ends on the line that has the vadjust node If that line had arbitrary text its depth would not be known. However as \strut was added and this had bigger depth than any letter or other normal text it is reasonable to assume the depth of the line is the depth of strutbox.

So \raisebox{\dp\strutbox} gets you back to the baseline of the previous line.

This will fail if you put some deep inline math or an inline tabular in the line, but if you need to deal with that you need a more complicated two pass measuring scheme.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] How to (temporarily) cancel centering

[Tex/LaTex] Why is `\strut` working in these scenarios

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