Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Date: 1995/12/15

>you have to experiment.  But allow TeX to adjust in some way that
>space, please, from page to page, with a little bit of glue:
>\fontsize{9pt}{11pt plus 0.2pt minus 0.1pt}

Horrors! No! :-) From Knuth, The TeXbook, page 78: "When you are typesetting a document that spans several pages, it's generally best to define \baselineskip^ so that it cannot stretch or shrink, because that will give more uniformity to pages. A small variation in the distance between baselines---say only half a point---can make a substantial difference in the appearence of the type, since it significantly affects the proportion of white to black."

^(\baselineskip is the primative TeX parameter that is ultimately set by the second argument to \fontsize.)

I might add that _any_ stretch component to \baselineskip could, in principle, allow arbitrary amount of stretching.

Usually, stretchability is added to a page through \parskip glue (space between paragraphs), space around certain environments, space above and below titles, or (in raggedbottom typesetting) at the bottom of the page. The LaTeX default appears to follow Knuth and seem to include no stretch or shrink components in \baselineskip.

Dan Luecking