Joseph Zitt

I’m working on a small quick book, a subset of the infamous Book of the Blog, focusing on my secondary job at a nearby church and the neighborhood around it.

I’m putting it together using the LaTeX document preparation system, which is wonderful in almost all ways, especially for a command line and markup language geek like me. However, as an otherwise unrelated poem goes, when it is bad, it is horrid.

The problem I’m hitting has to do with paragraph formatting. LaTeX does great work with spacing, hyphenation, and the like, making beautiful paragraphs when it can. However, when it hits stuff that it can’t handle, it just leaves words sticking way the hell out into the margins. This just won’t work.

I’ve dug through various documentation and FAQs. Some present a few tweaks that don’t help much, then suggest that you rewrite the paragraph. That’s not a good enough solution, and in some circumstances other than this (such as when one might be including a paragraph from an existing text, or republishing a historical text) wouldn’t be acceptable.

So I need a way to tell LaTex “Do the best you can with this, even if it isn’t perfect, but don’t stick stuff in the margins”?

Does anyone here (John? Ron? Claudia? Shosh? Brad?) have any insights?

Thanks for any enlightenment…

Update: It turns out that LaTeX has several commands to deal with this, such as \sloppy, \sloppypar, and \tolerance, as documented here. I’ll play with them to see what they do. Though simply knowing that they exist and work in the few small tests that I’ve done make me more confident in moving ahead with the first edit and not worrying too much about the formatting until later.