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I am trying to make all lines line up in my documents. As I am using a custom leading of exactly 15pt, I have replaced all occurrences of vertical space with the nearest multiple of 15, and all occurrences of \onelineskip/\baselineskip with \vspace{15pt}. I have applied this in many places, including the size and spacing of sections, custom spacing commands, etc.

However, problems arise when I create a new chapter. Here is the chapter style that I use:

% Chapter style
\makechapterstyle{mychapter}{%
  \renewcommand{\chapterheadstart}{}
  \renewcommand{\printchaptername}{}
  \renewcommand{\chapternamenum}{}
  \renewcommand{\printchapternum}{}
  \renewcommand{\afterchapternum}{}
  \renewcommand{\printchaptertitle}[1]{%
  \normalfont\normalsize\raggedright{\textls[140]{{\MakeTextUppercase{##1}}}}}
  \renewcommand{\afterchaptertitle}{%
    \vspace{15pt} \hrule\vspace{15pt}}
}

Still, when I create a new chapter, the lines do not line up.

Another issue that I have is the one of figures. Initially I assumed I could simply add some elastic space above and below all my figures (using something like \vspace{0pt plus 15pt}) but alas, the figures allowed text to sit right up to the bottom margin. To solve this, I set the height of my typeblock to a multiple of 15pt, but this did not work either.

I am well and truly lost. Could anyone help? Or is this a sign that it is time to move on to ConTeXt, since I am so focused on layout and formatting?

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    it is quite tricky to do grid typesetting in tex as the boxes and glue layout system does not really help, however \vspace{15pt} \hrule\vspace{15pt} an hrule is 0.4pt high so that is adding 30.4pt of vertical space so will push you off the grid
    – David Carlisle
    Commented Jun 24, 2018 at 10:00
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    As I understand it, the 0pt plus 15pt means no required space and up to 15pt if required to get good breaks etc. You want something like 15pt with no stretchy bit.
    – cfr
    Commented Jun 24, 2018 at 13:10
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    Have you looked at the grid package (> texdoc grid)? In general, as others have said, I think that TeX is not easily adaptable to typesetting on a grid. I once tried looking at it but decided that there were too many edge cases. Straight text was OK but anything like section headers, floats, quotes, verse, etc, threw everything into disarray.
    – Peter Wilson
    Commented Jun 24, 2018 at 18:22

1 Answer 1

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Thank you all for being so helpful in your suggestions, but I have decided against using LaTeX any more due to this and some other unresolvable difficulties I have had. To anyone else attempting grid typesetting in LaTeX that happens to see this answer, I would recommend to try ConTeXt instead; it has great grid typesetting support and seems like a more complete package for layout and formatting than LaTeX.

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