LaTeX breaking up too many words

latex

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?

Best Answer

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.