Dealing with variable-height fonts

Question

I'm having problems using LaTeX to deal with a certain font that I'd like to use for an art project. I'm writing a basic document, but when I use this font to write normal text, the baseline ends up automatically varying (presumably because some capitals in the font are too tall, though interestingly, letters going below the baseline like f, g, and y do not seem to affect this).

Since the font (1805 Austerlitz Script) is not free and I thus cannot simply distribute it, I'm not sure there's a point in posting a MWE, but I took a screenshot to show how the text (with no coding in between it) is printed with uneven baselines. Note that this also happened with some but not all "handwriting"-type script fonts I tested.

The first six lines are all one paragraph, and the last two lines are a second paragraph. There is no manual coding and no special environment for this text. All glyphs shown here are the same font size. As you can see though, the capital "H" in however is a particular culprit in this font, forcing substantially more space between lines 1 and 2 than there is between lines 3 and 4. But not all capitals affect this (cf. the capital A in line 3).

I realize that this is probably a font issue. However, is there any way to force LaTeX to print all the text with an equal baseline (less than shown)? I do not care if it results in overlapping text (it's an art project, so form over function). I'd rather not to have to enter code manually every time this extra gap occurs between lines since this document is a test for a much longer document using the same font. The font itself is non-negotiable.

The issue does persevere regardless of the global font size. Changing \baselineheight doesn't seem to help as a lower value (even negative) seems to only reduce space between paragraphs. It does not cause the text I have to even approach overlapping. Interestingly, the issue vanishes completely when I use the same font in Microsoft Word, leading me to believe there's something simple I can set up in LaTeX to fix this.

Thanks in advance for any and all recommendations. Sorry if this is a repeat question or one with an easy answer—I've been searching for hours to try to figure out how to do this.

— CB

Answer 1

(You can always make a mwe:-)

---

\documentclass{article}
\showoutput
\showboxdepth=3
\begin{document}

\fontfamily{cmdh}\selectfont

\def\z{High Dig  \^{H}at fff gg ABC $f=g$ }
\def\zz{one two three four five }

\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z\z
\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz\zz

\end{document}

Produces

where TeX is making even linespacing when lowercase letters are used, but gives up and just forces 1pt of space between each row of text when larger letters are involved.

You can see this by eye or check the log,

$ pdflatex dd683  | grep '\.\.\..*lineskip'
...\glue(\lineskip) 1.0
...\glue(\lineskip) 1.0
...\glue(\lineskip) 1.0
...\glue(\lineskip) 1.0
...\glue(\lineskip) 1.0
...\glue(\lineskip) 1.0
...\glue(\baselineskip) 0.33333
...\glue(\baselineskip) 2.27777
...\glue(\baselineskip) 2.27777
...\glue(\baselineskip) 2.27777

If you are on windows you may not have grep but ignore that just look for lines using lineskip (bad, usually) and baselineskip (good, usually)

So you have a choice: accept uneven spacing, or increase the spacing so it fits even the worst case, or force even spacing and check for any over-printing.

The lines in the first part of the paragraph are logged as

...\hbox(13.91667+1.94444)

so they are 14pt above the baseline and 2pt below, so setting a baselineskip of 16pt should be enough:

Changing the font selection to

 \fontfamily{cmdh}\fontsize{10pt}{16pt}\selectfont

produces a log of

$ pdflatex dd683  | grep '\.\.\..*lineskip'
...\glue(\baselineskip) 0.13889
...\glue(\baselineskip) 0.13889
...\glue(\baselineskip) 0.13889
...\glue(\baselineskip) 0.13889
...\glue(\baselineskip) 0.13889
...\glue(\baselineskip) 0.13889
...\glue(\baselineskip) 4.33333
...\glue(\baselineskip) 6.27777
...\glue(\baselineskip) 6.27777
...\glue(\baselineskip) 6.27777

so even baseline spacing, looking like

But that may be rather spacy so you could use

\lineskiplimit=-5pt
\fontfamily{cmdh}\fontsize{10pt}{13pt}\selectfont

which allows an over-print of up to 5pt using a baseline spacing of 13pt, producing a log of

$ pdflatex dd683  | grep '\.\.\..*lineskip'
...\glue(\baselineskip) -2.86111
...\glue(\baselineskip) -2.86111
...\glue(\baselineskip) -2.86111
...\glue(\baselineskip) -2.86111
...\glue(\baselineskip) -2.86111
...\glue(\baselineskip) -2.86111
...\glue(\baselineskip) 1.33333
...\glue(\baselineskip) 3.27777
...\glue(\baselineskip) 3.27777
...\glue(\baselineskip) 3.27777

showing even spacing but some negative spacing of arount 3pt inserted, this looks like

Which probably looks better than the fully spaced version in general but the math italic f does hit the accented H so if that happened in your real case you would have to decide to accept it or re-word of add a thin space so they miss or increase the baseline spacing slightly.