Please forgive me. I am quite the novice when it comes to LaTeX. I've been learning "on the fly" by downloading documents from the web and referring to sites like these to answer my questions. I'm at a total loss here.
In general, my question is how I can disable or otherwise override stretch/shrink on a page. I've tried \raggedbottom. thinking that it would leave white space at the bottom of a given page and keep all default text spacing. No such luck. So, then I tried using \vspace, thinking surely it would keep it's assigned size. 10pt would always be 10pt, right? No such luck. On this site, I read about how vertical shrink/stretch works, but I don't know how or where to "turn it off."
A very simple example:
\begin codeblock
code (multi-colored)
\end codeblock
Paragraph text.....
codeblock is a custom environment and code is the actual code. The words in the code are colored based on there function. When I look at the codeblock environment, I see no references to stretch or shrink. The problem I'm having is that I always want the same distance after the end of codeblock and the start of the next paragraph (currently using \vspace to do this), but currently this keeps changing.
I'm having the same trouble with the tabular environment. I don't care if the rest of the page shrinks or stretches a small bit (although I want to continue to use raggedbottom), but I want the space after a table or code block to be uniform. Any suggestions??? Much appreciated.
\parskipis a rigid length in your documents -- the default definition (given inlatex.ltx) is\parskip=0pt plus 1pt, i.e., there's some (very slight) stretchability there. – Mico Jul 16 '12 at 20:25