# Tabular and grid typesetting

In my document, I try to remove most of the vertical stretch, using some of the tricks detailed in this document. Specifically, I have

\setlength{\lineskiplimit}{-10pt}
\setlength{\lineskip}{0pt}


This, however, does not play nicely with \cmidrule from booktabs. From other posts, I gleaned, that the tabular environment uses different spacing methods, i.e., it sets \baselineskip to zero and relies on the \lineskiplimit to get correct spacing. This breaks when using the trick above, which is made even more clear when using \setlength{\lineskiplimit}{-999pt}: any table is rendered as a single line, in which all content is overlapping. What is a good/elegant way to fix this problem?

edit: The package grid is often mentioned as solving (part of) the grid typesetting issue, but this package also breaks \tabular:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{grid}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{cc}
one & two \\
three & four \\end{tabular}
\end{document}

• If TeX is inserting \lineskip you have already been pushed off the grid as the line did not fit within \baselineskip, so it isn't clear that disabling this helps in general. If you do disable it then as you say, you need to put it back for tables, and math alignments and several other things. – David Carlisle Oct 7 '13 at 10:15

\let\oldtabular\tabular