> one of the things that TeX can’t do particularly well is typesetting on a grid. This is something that people typesetting bibles really need to have. There are various hacks to try to make it happen, but they’re all horrible. In SILE, you can alter the behaviour of the typesetter and write a very short add-on package to enable grid typesetting."
> For two-sided prints with very thin paper, matching base lines would look much better. Especially in two-column documents it may be desirable to have baselines of adjacent lines at exactly the same height.
TeX usually tries to adjust the space between lines so that a single typeblock is more visually appealing. Unfortunately, doing this adjustment independently for side-by-side columns leads to output where the text lines don't line up, and that is way less visually appealing.
If you do a Google image search for [bible] and look at typical layouts used, I think this might be apparent.
Less obvious is that bibles are often printed on thin paper to fit a big document in a small space, so having things line up on one side of a leaf to the other is more important than in most other books.
> one of the things that TeX can’t do particularly well is typesetting on a grid. This is something that people typesetting bibles really need to have. There are various hacks to try to make it happen, but they’re all horrible. In SILE, you can alter the behaviour of the typesetter and write a very short add-on package to enable grid typesetting."
Alas, I don't know what that means. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/latex-cookbook/97817843... appears to give a clue:
> For two-sided prints with very thin paper, matching base lines would look much better. Especially in two-column documents it may be desirable to have baselines of adjacent lines at exactly the same height.
but I don't have access to the full content.