Is there a way to set distance between bottom of one line and up of other?

Question

This is my minimal working code:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,french,russian,swedish]{babel}
\begin{document}
  \selectlanguage{french}

  \begin{center}
  \fontsize{23pt}{25pt} \textbf{TH\'{E}SE} \\[8mm]
  \normalsize  PR\'{E}SENT\'{E}E A\\[7mm]
  \Large\textbf{L'UNIVERSIT\'{E} BORDEAUX 1}\\[10mm]
  \end{center}

\end{document}

What I need to do? I need to have exact size of font for every line and distance between bottom of upper line to up of line located below should be fixed. For fisrt two lines it should be 8 mm, then 7 and 10 at last. I've found how to set distances:

text \\[<distance>]

But it does not provide me what I need.

My second question concerns the:

\fontsize{23pt}{25pt}

Why I can not set font size bigger than 23pt, I would like to have bigger. And why second parameter does not effect behavior at all?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

You can resort to lower level commands; I'll add some rules to show that the distance is what's expected, although it's not clear whether accents should be taken into account. For arbitrary font size, load fix-cm.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,russian,swedish,french]{babel}
\usepackage{fix-cm}

\begin{document}

{\centering
\fontsize{23pt}{0pt}\selectfont
\textbf{TH\'{E}SE}\smash{\rlap{\vrule depth 8mm}} \\
\nointerlineskip\vspace{8mm}
\normalsize  PR\'{E}SENT\'{E}E A\smash{\rlap{\vrule depth 7mm}}\\
\nointerlineskip\vspace{7mm}
\Large\textbf{L'UNIVERSIT\'{E} BORDEAUX 1}\smash{\rlap{\vrule depth 10mm}}\\
\nointerlineskip\vspace{10mm}}
Other text to see what's the distance from the last line

\end{document}

Answer 2

The linespacing in TeX is baseline to baseline, not from base of one to top of another (top is a bit undefined do you mean top of the letters used or the position where (say) an accented capital would be)

The linespacing is per paragraph which is why you should normally use {\small xxxx \par} rather than just {\small xxxx} so that the font change is in scope at the end of the paragraph and a suitable baseline used.

Normally \\ does not start a paragraph and

  \fontsize{23pt}{25pt} \textbf{TH\'{E}SE} \\
  \normalsize  PR\'{E}SENT\'{E}E A\\
  \Large\textbf{L'UNIVERSIT\'{E} BORDEAUX 1}\\

would set all the text to the baseline specified by \Large . As it happens center uses a special version of \\ that does internally use \par. so inside a center they do get specified baselines.

The default font sizes of latex for Computer Modern are restricted to the sizes commonly available when these fonts were distributed as bitmap formats. If you use a scalable font such as times then any size may be used, or to tell latex that computer modern is scalable use the fixcm package.

Answer 3

The default stack of the stackengine package is a "short" stack, in which the vertical gap between adjacent objects is set. So here, I just use a compound stack, specifying that gap with each nesting. By contrast, a long stack (not used here) will set the distance between adjacent baselines.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,french,russian,swedish]{babel}
\usepackage[usestackEOL]{stackengine}
\begin{document}
  \selectlanguage{french}
\parskip 10mm
{\centering
  \stackunder[7mm]{%
    \stackunder[8mm]{%
      \fontsize{23pt}{25pt} \textbf{TH\'{E}SE}%
    }{%
      \normalsize  PR\'{E}SENT\'{E}E A%
    }%
  }{%
    \Large\textbf{L'UNIVERSIT\'{E} BORDEAUX 1}%
  }%
\par}

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

\parskip 0mm
YYYYYYYYYYYYYY
\end{document}