Btukfyl

I'm producing a series of flash cards in LaTeX (well, actually XeLaTeX). Each card has a title, a short paragraph of text, and a table, which is the main purpose of the card. Occasionally the paragraph references a footnote (which is laid out in the normal way at the foot of the card). The tables all occupy the same vertical height, but the paragraph above and the footnotes below (if present) can take up varying amounts of space.

I want to lay out the cards so the table appears in the same vertical position on each card, regardless of how much text there is above or below. Because of the way I'm generating the cards, I have very limited control over the LaTeX source, but unlimited control over the .sty file. In particular, I cannot wrap the table in a textblock (e.g. as per this question). What I really want is a way of doing vspace to 4cm, i.e. with an absolute page offset. Is anything like this possible?

You can set the paragraph inside a parbox[<pos>][<height>]{<width>}{<stuff>} where <pos> is set to top, <width> is fixed at linewidth and you specify something in <height> that accommodates all the paragraphs. Here's an example that uses 20baselineskip (to fit 20 lines of text):

documentclass{article}



usepackage{geometry,lipsum}



geometry{

  papersize = {6in,5in}, % A flash card

  margin = 0.5in

}



setlength{parindent}{0pt}

newlength{parboxheight}

setlength{parboxheight}{20baselineskip}



begin{document}



parbox[t][parboxheight]{linewidth}{%

  strut

  lipsum*[1]% Your paragraph here

  strut

}



{centering texttt{tabular} herepar}



clearpage



parbox[t][parboxheight]{linewidth}{%

  strut

  lipsum*[2]% Your paragraph here

  strut

}



{centering texttt{tabular} herepar}



clearpage



parbox[t][parboxheight]{linewidth}{%

  strut

  lipsum*[3]% Your paragraph here

  strut

}



{centering texttt{tabular} herepar}



clearpage



parbox[t][parboxheight]{linewidth}{%

  strut

  lipsum*[4]% Your paragraph here

  strut

}



{centering texttt{tabular} herepar}



end{document}

Using minipage is also a possibility.