[OS X TeX] Overfull \hbox errors

[Maarten Sneep]

On 24 Oct 2005, at 11:53, Damon Muller wrote:

> Short of re-writing a sentence, or forcing a hyphen, is there any  
> way to
> correct overfull \hbox errors? Something like the '\\' command, but
> which leaves the lines justified.

I think \linebreak will do what you need. The command works in a very  
similar fashion
to \newline: it accepts an optional argument indicating how much you  
want a linebreak
at that point.

Alternatively, you can figure out which word doesn't want to break  
for you, and insert
optional hyphens where you want a word to break (\-). Remember that  
word that have
a hyphen in them will not break any further.

> I think it's the apacite BibTeX style which is causing my problem -
> specifically, when a paragraph starts with a reference citation it
> doesn't seem to be very good at guessing how long the line should be,
> and ends up jutting half a word out of the right margin. This makes my
> beautiful thesis look a lot less beautiful!

I don't know about that, although I've seen many weird things from  
specific
bibliographic styles. Can you post a specific entry as it appears in  
the .bbl file
(i.e. the output of bibtex, as included with the \thebibliography 
{...} command).

> For some of the lines where it's happened I've either re-written the
> sentence to move the reference citation onto a later line of the
> paragraph (which seems to work), and I've also tried manually
> hyphenating some of the last words on the line, but some words don't
> easily hyphenate, and some sentences are best not re-written. There  
> has
> to be an easier solution.

\newline should help, and titles can never be re-written. Sometimes  
playing with
the sloppyness can help. I guess you already consulted the FAQ?
     http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?introduction=yes

The LaTeX Companion contains a section on dealing with the issue.

Maarten


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