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The Hyphenation Problem LaTeX relies on an algorithm to automatically hyphenate words at the ends of lines as needed to produce visually appealing line breaks. However, the algorithm is not perfect and can sometimes produce awkward or ugly hyphenations that disrupt the reading flow. Common automatic hyphenation issues include: Hyphenating words that should not be…

When typesetting documents with LaTeX, you may encounter cryptic warnings about “overfull hboxes,” “underfull vboxes,” or “loose lines” even if your document looks perfectly fine visually. These warnings originate from LaTeX’s built-in tolerance settings that govern how strictly it evaluates the typographic quality of your content. However, the default settings are sometimes too rigid for…

Understanding Underfull Boxes An underfull box in LaTeX refers to a line of text that does not properly fill the entire width allocated to it by the document’s margins. This can result in too much whitespace on some lines, leading to inconsistent spacing and odd gaps that disrupt the visual flow of text. Underfull boxes…

The Problem of Technical Debt in LaTeX Technical debt refers to the implicit cost of code or project architecture that is convenient in the short term but sets up a need for future refactoring. As LaTeX documents and codebases grow in size and complexity over time, the accumulation of technical debt can make them difficult…

Improving Readability of LaTeX Documents with Code Blocks LaTeX documents often contain code blocks to demonstrate programming concepts, data structures, algorithms, and more. Properly formatting these code blocks is essential for readability, legibility, and accessibility. This article will discuss several techniques for improving the presentation of code blocks in LaTeX documents, focusing on commenting, line…

The Pitfalls of Commenting Out Sections When working on complex LaTeX documents, you may find yourself needing to temporarily comment out large sections of code to test compilations or isolate issues. However, blindly commenting out chunks of text can lead to problematic errors. LaTeX code blocks often rely on meticulously formatted \begin{environment} and \end{environment} pairs…

The Burden of Manual Commenting The complex structure of large LaTeX documents requires extensive commenting to facilitate review, collaboration and iteration. However, manually adding descriptive comments throughout lengthy manuscripts is an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. Writers must continuously disrupt their workflow to insert explanatory notes, describe changes, pose questions or leave feedback. This greatly…

Understanding the Problem The TikZ 3d graphical library allows the creation of three-dimensional graphics within LaTeX documents. The library includes built-in functions to plot points, lines, planes, and other 3d objects onto a canvas representing the 3d coordinate space. By default, the xy plane in TikZ 3d matches the actual xy plane of the 3d…

Defining Section Levels LaTeX provides commands to structure documents into sections, subsections, and subsubsections. The core commands are \section, \subsection, and \subsubsection. Using these allows numbering and formatting of heading levels in the document. The \section command defines the highest level section heading in a document. It will produce a numbered heading formatted according to…

The titlesec package in LaTeX allows extensive customization of section title formatting, but can sometimes lead to loss of expected automatic section numbering. This article explores workarounds to restore numbering without needing to completely restructure documents. Identifying the Root Cause Understanding exactly how titlesec configuration choices can disrupt LaTeX’s native section numbering mechanism is helpful…