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I've written a document in LaTeX, using two-column format, 11pt, times font. Many of my words appear hyphenated, and for every description list item, I get a badbox warning (no problems visible in the output though). How can I fix this?

TripShock
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    Can you please post a small sample? Maybe a single page with your content stripped down so that the effect occurs and can be debugged, but not the whole document? – mmr Oct 22 '09 at 20:54

4 Answers4

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While, yes, you could make TeX less picky or even go the ragged option, this is best fixed by the microtype package. Just loading it should do the trick:

\usepackage{microtype}

It provides two features to improve the typesetting of paragraphs:

  • Margin kerning: characters, especially punctuation, will protrude a small fraction into the margin. Practically, this has the effect of very slightly increasing the line length and (IMO) visually looks very nice.
  • Font expansion: as well as stretching/shrinking the space between words to create a flush paragraph, the characters themselves are stretched/shrunk by very small amounts (less than one percent). This is visually imperceptible at the character level but, surprisingly, makes a huge difference at the paragraph level.
Will Robertson
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you should set a hyphenation penalty somewhere in your preamble:

\hyphenpenalty=750

The value of 750 suited my needs for a two column layout on letter paper (8.5x11 in) with a 12 pt font. Adjust the value to suit your needs. The higher the number, the less hyphenation will occur. You may also want to have a look at the hyphenatpackage, it provides a bit more than just hyphenation penalty.

Mica
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I've always just used \raggedright for this, but I've never done that for an entire paper. This FAQ (which is one of my go-to LaTeX resources) recommends the ragged2e package.

Oh, and a side note: I never pay attention to bad boxes unless I can see them in the output. This is probably dumb, but LaTeX is much pickier than I am.

Matt Parker
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    Using the draft option — \documentclass[draft]{...} — or using something like \overfullrule=5pt will show overfull boxes in red, so you can notice them and decide if you care. And to make TeX less picky, you can change \hfuzz (e.g. with \hfuzz=1pt). – ShreevatsaR Oct 22 '09 at 21:54
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    That's very helpful, thank you - I can't believe I've never heard of that before. – Matt Parker Oct 22 '09 at 22:12
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Based on the answers from another post, I found these settings to be perfect to prevent hyphenation altogether without being ugly:

\tolerance=9999
\emergencystretch=10pt
\hyphenpenalty=10000
\exhyphenpenalty=100

\tolerance=9999 allows as much whitespace as possible.

\emerencystretch=10pt allows some extra whitespace per line.

\hyphenpenalty=10000 disables hyphens completly.

\exhyphenpenalty=100 allows using hyphens which were already present.

Alexander Braekevelt
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