[Tex/LaTex] What are underfull hboxes and vboxes and how can I get rid of them

boxesline-breakingwarnings

Often, TeX outputs underfull hbox and vbox warnings when running and in the generated log file. What are these and how can I get rid of them?

Best Answer

TeX puts elements (letters, lines, paragraphs, pictures,...) in boxes and joins them together on pages using glue (put between them) that can stretch, e.g., to make sure that lines are justified, or that pages are filled to their specified height. In the first example, the line is put in a hbox (horizontal box, or box with material arranged horizontally with respect to one another, words in this case), in the second, the page is put in a vbox (vertical box, or box with material arranged vertically with respect to one another, usually paragraphs and displayed equations in this case).

Such a box is underfull in case TeX has to stretch the glue more than what is specified to be (aestethically) acceptable. In that case there will, e.g., be much whitespace between words of a line (hbox case) or extra whitespace between paragraphs (vbox case).

To avoid underfull hboxes (and also overfull ones), one can, in LaTeX, use the microtype package, which, when used in pdflatex mode (directly generating a .pdf file, and not a .dvi one), can stretch letters as well, which allows TeX to get acceptable whitespace in lines more often.

Another, manual route is to reformulate sentences and paragraphs, or add explicit hyphenation (e.g., hyphen\-ation) to get better linebreaks. One can sometimes even fix bad pagebreaks (overfull vboxes) in this way as well, by shortening or lengthening paragraphs with one line.