Talk:LaTeX/Lengths

Typo
"\unitlength    Units of lenght in Picture Environment" "lenght" should read "length"

Examples
How about some examples - cookbooks are always the best?
 * Examples have been written. More are always welcome! --Ambrevar (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

need examples
this definitely needs examples - I would put them if I knew how to use these...Towsonu2003 (talk) 03:53, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
 * See above. --Ambrevar (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

depth of text?
Width and height seem obvious, but what does the depth of text refer to? (I'm assuming we are not dealing with 3D fonts here.)


 * I've put a link to Boxes for the details. --Ambrevar (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Broken references
I have tried the link in the reference now, and it was broken. -- Harp (discuss • contribs) 18:30, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

LaTeX default lengths
Is this section a complete list of LaTeX default lengths? -- XonqNopp Tk 06:26, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

warning at the end of "Fixed-length spaces"

 * "Anyway, these commands should never be used in regular documents."

"should never" is quite strongly worded, which means there should be a very good reason not to do this. I am not aware of any, the only thing I can come up with is that it mucks with the formatting in a lower-level way. The strongest phrasing corresponding to that would be more like "should be avoided" and not "should never". Hence:
 * Why is using these commands bad?
 * How bad is using them? What will happen?

I'd be grateful if anyone could clarify this in the article.

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A meta-remark: Wikibooks doesn't yet have other inline cleanup templatesundefined (while Wikipedia has quite a few of them), so I used even though it doesn't match the purpose. Template:Fix says that creation of new Templates should be discussed first, so I didn't create a new one but picked the closest existing one. I spent more time than I should on getting the question I'm concerned with acceptably presented, so I will not spend even more time on finding the right page for this meta-concern.)

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I don't agree with this either. There are plenty of cases in which these commands are useful, including in the definition of commands (which even people who get very upset about the use of low-level formatting commands in the middle of the documents should be able to agree is okay). Also, sometimes it’s just easier to manually drop a space in than to go correcting all sorts of complicated parameters that might cause effects throughout the rest of your document (today I used \smallskip because the space before and after my table wasn’t quite balanced – for whatever reason LaTeX was treating one side as elastic and the other not).

Perhaps it could instead say something like “The use of these commands should be avoided within running text whenever possible.” Even then, I’m not sure this really belongs in the box with “This is a common error.” This page is about lengths, which are by definition lower-level formatting commands, and it doesn’t really seem like an appropriate place to preach about separating content from formatting. Sobjornstad (discuss • contribs) 15:42, 13 December 2014 (UTC)