[Tex/LaTex] What, no warning when minipage overflows page

minipagepdftexwarnings

Instead of complaining about a warning message, I am complaining about lack of a warning message. MWE:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
It was a dark and stormy night.\par
\newpage
% The following lorem ipsum will visually be clipped to one page.
% But the entire text is written into the PDF, mostly hidden.
\begin{minipage}[t][.8\textheight][t]{\textwidth}
First: \lipsum{}\par
Second: \lipsum{}\par
Third: \lipsum{}\par
\end{minipage}
\newpage
And so to bed.\par
\end{document}

Above, there is too much text to fit the minipage environment, which will not continue to a next page. In my case, this is the desired behavior, because I am trying to do a vertical clip to remain on one page.

Setting minipage height to less than full textblock height does not clip at the end of minipage. This is surprising, but acceptable here. It does clip at the very bottom of the page MediaBox. However, no warning message appears in the log file! I expected an Overfull vbox warning.

I know that all of the text is written into the PDF, because I can see it all, when the PDF is uncompressed and opened in a hex editor. That means that there is non-printable text, which would cause the PDF to be rejected when scrutinized for standards compliance.

So, my question is: How can I generate at least a logfile Overfull vbox warning message, for the above situation? Or is there something already in the logfile, but I don't know what it means?

Best Answer

This is "by design" the vertical size options of minipage and parbox are analogues (and share the code of) the horizontal size option of \makebox.

\makebox[0pt][l]{...}

hides the size of the content and makes it silently overprint surrounding material. \parbox with [t] in the inner alignment is the same.

If you use s then you get a warning

\begin{minipage}[t][.8\textheight][s]{\textwidth}

logs:

Overfull \vbox (1188.41469pt too high) detected at line 12

But with s you are responsible to add stretchable glue to achieve the specified size. If you add glue that will stretch but not shrink you will get warnings for too much material but no warnings for too little.

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