LaTeX breaking up too many words

Question

I've written a document in LaTeX, using two-column format, 11pt, times font. Many of my words appear hyphenated, and for every description list item, I get a badbox warning (no problems visible in the output though). How can I fix this?

Answer 1

While, yes, you could make TeX less picky or even go the ragged option, this is best fixed by the microtype package. Just loading it should do the trick:

\usepackage{microtype}

It provides two features to improve the typesetting of paragraphs:

• Margin kerning: characters, especially punctuation, will protrude a small fraction into the margin. Practically, this has the effect of very slightly increasing the line length and (IMO) visually looks very nice.
• Font expansion: as well as stretching/shrinking the space between words to create a flush paragraph, the characters themselves are stretched/shrunk by very small amounts (less than one percent). This is visually imperceptible at the character level but, surprisingly, makes a huge difference at the paragraph level.