dougcc@csv.viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller) (08/17/89)
In article <1640@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>, dave@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Dave Stuit) writes: > (As a side note, I'll mention that TeX sucks at justifying text in narrow > columns. Its unwillingness to allow minor imperfections in a paragraph > occasionally lead it to give up completely, producing absurd results. This happens because TeX has a maximum badness rating for lines of 10 000. When it is having trouble making a narrow paragraph, it does tend to make one appallingly bad line in order to make the rest OK. It thinks it has done good because the badness is "only" 10000 for the absurd line. In fact the badness could "really" be orders of magnitude worse than this. > I know little about TeX, but several people who knew much more were unable to > fix this by monkeying with tolerances and such. It won't work, because you still run into the 10 000 badness ceiling. The answer is to "scale down" TeX's badness calculations by introducing more stretch into the interword space. For example, to double the stretch between words in 10pt roman: \fontdimen3\tenrm=2\fontdimen3\tenrm You could also achieve this be assigning an appropriate glue value to \spaceskip. I have got quite reasonable results using these techniques.