[Tex/LaTex] badbox of “underful hbox (badness 1158)”

badnessbibtexhyphenation

I wrote the following reference in my .bib file:

@ARTICLE{Auvinet11,
  author = {E. Auvinet and F. Multon and A. St-Arnaud and J. Rousseau and J. Meunier},
  title = {Fall Detection With Multiple Cameras: An Occlusion-Resistant Method \\
    Based on 3-D Silhouette Vertical Distribution},
  journal = {Information Technology in Biomedicine},
  year = {2011},
  volume = {15},
  pages = {290-300},
}

Because of this reference, LaTeX gives me a badbox warning

underful hbox (badness 1158)

and the output .dvi file is like the following:

enter image description here

How can I solve this problem?

Postscript

Taking David Carlisle and Svend Tveskaeg's suggestion, I added \hyphenation{bio-med-i-cine} to my preamble. The result becomes:

enter image description here

This is better, but the author part is still not correct.

One more question, how does Latex decide to break the sentence?
Does it break according to the correct hyphenation points of the word?

Best Answer

By default using the US English patterns, TeX doesn't hyphenate the word "Biomedicine"; you could add something like

\hyphenation{Bio-medi-cine}

to your preamble.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Underful hbox badness 10000

Although it is difficult to adequately reproduce this warning (not an error), you may be after the UK TeX FAQ entry No line here to end. Here is one such a reproduction of the warning:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begin{description}
  \item[Very long label] Some starter text \\
    \\
    Here is some more text.
\end{description}
\end{document}

The problem stems from the use of \\ to insert a blank line. Rather use a vertical skip (like \smallskip, \medskip or \bigskip) or leave a blank line - that would indicate a paragraph break and an associated "blank line". Alternatively, a resolution suggested is to provide an infinite stretch of space \hspace*{\fill} so that there's enough "to go around" for TeX to fill the line before breaking it.

[Tex/LaTex] underfull \hbox (badness 1342) in paragraph

Since you're writing in Spanish, which has many accented words, it's necessary to employ fonts in T1 encoding, that have glyphs for the accented characters. Otherwise TeX won't hyphenate words with accented letters past them.

Here's an example with your paragraph; I've made some suppositions about how the macros are defined.

\documentclass[a4paper,twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\usepackage{amsmath,xspace}
\newcommand{\QR}{\textbf{QR}\xspace}
\newcommand{\seq}[2][x]{#1_1,#1_2,\dots,#1_{#2}}

\textwidth=.8\textwidth

\begin{document}

\begin{equation}\label{eq1.32}
a=b
\end{equation}

Las ecuaciones en \eqref{eq1.32} sugieren un m\'etodo para calcular las 
factorizaciones \QR reducidas. Dados $a^1,a^2,\dotsc$, podemos construir 
los vectores $\seq[q]{n}$ y los escalares $r_{ij}$ por un proceso de
ortogonalizaci\'on sucesiva. Esta es una idea antigua, conocida como 
la \textit{ortogonalizaci\'on de Gram-Schimd}.

\end{document}

enter image description here

If I remove the line \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, then I get the warning

Underfull \hbox (badness 1147) in paragraph at lines 16--21
[]\OT1/cmr/m/n/10 Las ecua-cio-nes en [] su-gie-ren un

and the result is as follows (notice the bad spacing):

enter image description here

PS: It's "Gram-Schmidt"! I find it written in many different ways in my students' papers. :)

Postscript

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Underful hbox badness 10000

[Tex/LaTex] underfull \hbox (badness 1342) in paragraph

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