A Pragmatic Approach to Paragraphs, by Philip Taylor (tug.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What's your method for dealing with underfull/overfull \hboxes and unacceptable badness in general?

LaTeX has the \sloppy command which IIRC sets \tolerance to 9999, and \emergencystretch to a large value. But the default \tolerance is 200 (I think), which is a big difference. It's very "either/or" when maybe there's a more optimal way.

For my native language (swedish) I've found that many issues arise because TeX doesn't find all the possible hyphenation points, so I usually spend time adding words to the hyphenation list.

But still, in any longer text there's usually a couple of paragraphs that just won't set right, I'm curious about your tricks or methods for dealing with them.

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[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If I am writing the paper/book, rewrite the sentence to make it break nicely.

If it is typesetting a book, I would tweak the \hsize first so there would be minimal amount of total overfull.

If the engine supports pdfTeX microtype extensions, and the \hsize is small, use microtype.

this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023

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TeX typesetting

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