[Tex/LaTex] How to stop LaTeX from forcing single line paragraphs on two lines

spacing

I have a document containing some short paragraphs which would fit on a single line using normal spacing. When typesetting those paragraphs LaTex apparently tries hard to stretch those lines (the words) far enough to make it a two-line paragraph. That produces some very ugly paragraphs. LaTex even hyphenates the last word of the paragraph to get only the shortest possible part of it on the second line.

I tried adjusting the word stretching by lowering the setting for \fontdimen3\font to 0.2pt but this does not feel right.

Is it possible to tell LaTeX not to stretch paragraphs on at least 2 lines?

Edit:

I found the cause deep down in our templates:

\tolerance 1414
\emergencystretch 1.5em

Here's a minimal working example:

\documentclass[parskip=half*]{scrartcl}
\tolerance 1414
\emergencystretch 1.5em
\begin{document}
   This is a sentence that would usually fit on one line with normal spacing.
\end{document}

Removing one of both lines fixes the spacing of one line paragraphs. I am not yet familiar with what those commands do exactly, but I assume they had been added because some of the generated code produced overfull text lines.

Still, I don't understand why – with these settings – LaTeX tries to produce an extra line in the paragraph. From what I understand, \tolerance and \emergencystretch are supposed to jump in when formatting within the default rules is not possible. Where am I wrong?

Edit2

The parskip=half* setting for the srcartcl document class appears to play a role in this game, also.

Best Answer

use parskip=half and not half*:

\documentclass[11pt, a4paper, 
  parskip=half,% <=====
  bibliography=totoc, 
  final,  
  numbers=noenddot]{scrartcl}

Read the documentation of KOMA-Script for the difference.

Related Question