[ghmerrill]

That makes sense.  My initial reaction would be "If it looks okay in the one case, why doesn't it look okay in the other?", but I can imagine it may be confusing.    I don't think there's any point to reducing the height of the background since in a lot of cases critical chunks of that line will still be obscured.  But of course, in a lot of cases, only an upper portion of that line may appear anyway. And if retaining distinct separation of the two halves with some degree of "spacing" or "interruption" yields the best effect, then you probably can't do better.  It seems likely that there's always some display issue you're going to run into at that border. I've tried to think of alternatives but the only one that I think might (I emphasize "might") work would be a processor intensive AI approach that would lay out both "halves" of the page dynamically and provide for unobstructive separation.  Not an approach worth pursuing.