LaTeX puts text and symbols in boxes and arranges them. There are boxes of whole paragraphs, but also of single letters and symbols. In this recipe, we will closely examine the dimensions of those boxes. We will also take a look at the spacing in between and the resulting dimensions of dynamically adjusted space. This will give us a better understanding of the typesetting.
We will additionally load the package lua-visual-debug. Then, we will compile the document with LuaLaTeX, as follows:
Open your document or any sample file. Again, we will use the document from our first recipe in Chapter 1, The Variety of Document Types.
Add the following line at the end of your preamble:
\usepackage{lua-visual-debug}Switch to LuaLaTeX in your editor for typesetting and compile the document. Take a look at these cutouts of the output. The text has some annotations, as follows:
Formulae consist of many small boxes:
Examining the boxes may give you ideas...