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From: dougcc@csv.viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Making TeX do narrow columns
Message-ID: <1355@csv.viccol.edu.au>
Date: 17 Aug 89 04:25:31 GMT
References: <65741@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <1640@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Organization: Computer Services, Victoria College, Melbourne
Lines: 25

In article <1640@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>, dave@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Dave Stuit) writes:
> (As a side note, I'll mention that TeX sucks at justifying text in narrow
> columns.  Its unwillingness to allow minor imperfections in a paragraph
> occasionally lead it to give up completely, producing absurd results.

This happens because TeX has a maximum badness rating for lines of 10 000. 
When it is having trouble making a narrow paragraph, it does tend to make
one appallingly bad line in order to make the rest OK.  It thinks it has
done good because the badness is "only" 10000 for the absurd line.  In fact
the badness could "really" be orders of magnitude worse than this.

> I know little about TeX, but several people who knew much more were unable to
> fix this by monkeying with tolerances and such.

It won't work, because you still run into the 10 000 badness ceiling.
The answer is to "scale down" TeX's badness calculations by introducing more
stretch into the interword space.  For example, to double the stretch
between words in 10pt roman:

\fontdimen3\tenrm=2\fontdimen3\tenrm

You could also achieve this be assigning an appropriate glue value to
\spaceskip.

I have got quite reasonable results using these techniques.