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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly, overful hbox error means that you must rearrange your text to produce pleasant render. If that's correct, then I'd argue that this error is everything that's right with LaTeX, because I hate with passion

    d o c u m e n t s        w i t h        h u g e        s p a c e s.

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The huge spacing is actually an underfull hbox (i.e. TeX couldn't fill it enough, so had to stretch the spaces). An overfull box is a box where the contained text overflows the box; usually it's a line where the end juts into the margin, which is even uglier than the underfulls, IMO.

I really wish TeX would prefer underfull to overfull. So many times I've read two column documents where the author ignored the warnings and the columns overlapped, making things pretty hard to read. (Well, actual overlap is rare, but uncomfortably close is common.)

AFAIK, it does prefer underfull boxes to overfull ones,but sometimes the penalties work out such that it has to put in an overfull anyways (IME really long words that it doesn't know how to hyphenate correctly are usually the culprit, and it's more frequent in two-column than single column layouts). You can probably set it to be even stricter though by tweaking the penalties for underfulls and overfulls. The details escape me, but it's probably pretty easy once you find the right part of the TeX book to consult.

He was probably referring to the fact that preventing an overfull box without rearranging text is linebreaking too early, thus creating that excessive spacing. Also note that underfull boxes actually are a subjective thing; you cannot easily draw a line between "ok spacing" and "too wide". People will have different opinions on this, especially if they have no clue about typesetting they might not even realize it. So what (la)tex does here is quite clever in that it creates a layout that will make even the complete novice realize something is wrong. Of course then people can still ignore that but well, if you just don't care what your thesis looks like...

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