Hans wrote,
Just wondering ... do you think that the first pages look ok?
Thanks for your response. By "look ok", are you referring to the closeness of the lines of text? It does seem kind of close, but within acceptable limits, depending on other constraints; however I'm not really the one to make aesthetic decisions about the document. I'm just trying to implement what the customer wants. Also, the minimal example is stripped down to minimally exercise the unexplained behavior, so it doesn't reflect the fact that in our actual document, we reduce the font size in places where we reduce the interlinespace. In that sense, maybe a less minimal example would serve the purpose better. I'll work on that, now that I know the font size may be an integral part of the problem.
You mess with the interlinespace in a way that will make the outcome never look okay.
I'd like to know more what that means, but I think it's elaborated on below when you talk about baselineskip.
Also, columnsets assume that the interlinespace is sane.
Can you point me to documentation on the constraints that define what kind of interlinespace is sane? Also, given the goal that "For using ConTeXt, no TeX programming skills and no technical background are needed. Some basic knowledge of typography and document design will enable you to use the full power of ConTeXt" (http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt), does/could ConTeXt issue an error when its assumptions are violated?
\setbox0\hbox{Tg}\the\htdp0,\the\baselineskip
gives
10.59601pt,9.3pt
so, any line that has a character with ascender and descender will enforce a larger than 9.3pt distance + lineskip and mess up any prediction cq. heuristics
I can't find any reference defining \htdp0, but I'm guessing it means the height+depth (where depth means how far descenders extend below the baseline) of the "Tg" box. I'm also confused as to why you're adding 9.3pt + lineskip, when in my limited understanding of TeX, I understood lineskip to be *part* of the distance between baselines, rather than an additional distance. But maybe that's not important to the main issue. I'm trying to formulate a rule for knowing whether "interlinespace is sane". Is it that interlinespace needs to be more than or equal to the maximum of (height + depth + lineskip) of any line in the text? Thanks again for your help. Lars