# 1.5 spacing with \baselinestretch

I am writing my thesis by using a .cls file of our university which is supposed to be 1.5 spacing with 12pt. According to this .cls file single space is defined as,

``````{\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1}
``````

double space is defined as,

``````{\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{2}
``````

but one and half spacing is the following:

``````{\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.15}
``````

Since it is a predefined class by university I am not sure if it is a mistake for 1.5 spacing but they gave me a correction about spacing when I use 1.15. I am not using any other functions for spacing so, to obtain 1.5 spacing should I make it {1.5} ? And, how can I check if resulting pdf is 1.5 spaced ?

• I guess, your university assumes a MS Word workflow. So just set up a word document with the right fonts, set it’s spacing to one-and-a-half and finddle the value in TeX until it looks like in Word ;-) – Tobi Jun 6 '17 at 13:57
• Thanks for the input ! I have done that and my pdf looks fine when compared to the MS Word file. – Kadir Jun 7 '17 at 17:27

The terms are not that well defined but setting baselinestretch to 2 is far to much for what is normally thought of as doublespacing the usual package in this area is `setspace` which defines `\doublespace` and `\onehalfspacing` as follows (so 1.667 and 1.25 respectively). I think the idea is not to double (or multiply by 1.5) the baseline to baseline distance but rather double the average distance of the white space between bottom of one line and top of the next, so the scale factors are font dependent in principle.

That said, your class designer may have intended 1.5 and the 1.15 is a typo, hard to know unless the designer is still around to ask.

``````\newcommand{\onehalfspacing}{%
\setstretch{1.25}%  default
\ifcase \@ptsize \relax % 10pt
\setstretch {1.25}%
\or % 11pt
\setstretch {1.213}%
\or % 12pt
\setstretch {1.241}%
\fi
}

\newcommand{\doublespacing}{%
\setstretch {1.667}%  default
\ifcase \@ptsize \relax % 10pt
\setstretch {1.667}%
\or % 11pt
\setstretch {1.618}%
\or % 12pt
\setstretch {1.655}%
\fi
}
``````