[Tex/LaTex] Source of “correct” baselinestretch values for various fonts

fontsline-spacingtypography

I once encountered the advice to use \renewcommand\baselinestretch{1.025} after \usepackage{bera} (though I am not 100% certain that 1.025 was the suggested value). There's little doubt to my relatively untrained eye that the results are better with the renewal than without. If I recall correctly, the source I got that from also had suggested values for other fonts, together with an explanation of why this was necessary for some fonts.

I've googled around and consulted the dead-trees I have at hand, but cannot find where I got this all from. So, is there a canonical source of the required adjustment values? A clear explanation of why this is necessary for some fonts? Or, is this all a figment of my imagination?

Best Answer

It's not a figment of your imagination—the amount of leading is an important aspect of the typographic design. It's more complicated than just a certain value for a certain font, however.

Ages ago I wrote a document comparing a paragraphs with varying linewidths and leading; you can find the file here: http://gist.github.com/608324

The file also gives "relative speed" values for quantitative tests that were performed at some stage, but I've lot my reference right now so that's about as much information as I can give you.

Digression aside, there are two main variables to consider when choosing the leading:

The x-height of the font: a font like Palatino will need more leading than a font like Garamond, since the lines are effectively closer together due to the larger height of the lowercase letters
The width of the text block: a longer linewidth requires larger leading

It would be fun to produce an empirical equation to relate these three.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Rhythm: different values for parskip and baselineskip in scrartcl

Not a complete answer, but a (hopefully) useful hint: The observed inattentiveness of the parskip=full class option to a change of \baselinestretch seems to be caused by the fontspec package. The following example (compiled with XeLaTeX, fontspec commented out) yields a value for \parskip of about 17.4 pt (i.e., the same as \baselineskip).

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt,parskip=full]{scrartcl} 
% \usepackage{fontspec}
\linespread{1.2}
\begin{document}
  lineskip: \the\lineskip\\
  baselineskip: \the\baselineskip\\
  baselinestretch: \baselinestretch\\
  parskip: \the\parskip\\
\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] Change the baselinestretch (line spacing) only for figure captions

You can use caption package together with setspace package. This is what caption documentation says:

enter image description here

Further, you can use setspace package to adjust spacing for the whole document by using the commands it provides as noted by egreg.

A MWE will be:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{graphicx,kantlipsum,setspace}
\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup[table]{font={stretch=1.2}}     %% change 1.2 as you like
\captionsetup[figure]{font={stretch=1.2}}    %% change 1.2 as you like
 %% or
 %% \captionsetup{font={stretch=1.2}}  %% this affects both figure and table


%\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.5}
\setstretch{1.5}


\begin{document}

\chapter{Some chapter}
\kant[1-3]
\begin{table}[htb]
\centering
\caption{\kant[1]}\label{tab:mytable}
Some table comes here
\end{table}

\kant[4-8]
\begin{figure}[htb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=4cm]{example-image-a}
\caption{\kant[2]}\label{fig:myfig}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Rhythm: different values for parskip and baselineskip in scrartcl

[Tex/LaTex] Change the baselinestretch (line spacing) only for figure captions

Related Question