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From: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Sloppy line-breaking: I didn't want it THAT sloppy!
Message-ID: <1990Nov10.174740.8440@ioe.lon.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Nov 90 17:47:40 GMT
References: <944@edg1.UUCP> <1990Nov9.141914.22787@ioe.lon.ac.uk> <1990Nov9.225739.19636@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK)
Organization: Institute of Education University of London
Lines: 23

In article <1990Nov9.225739.19636@csrd.uiuc.edu> eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout) writes:
>teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK) writes:
>
>>\newenvironment{bettersloppy}
>>  {\begin{sloppy}\emergencystretch=0.25\textwidth }
>>  {\end{sloppy}}
>
>>This is conjectural, and you should play with the 0.25 until you get
>>something that works.
>
>Someone informed my that a value of 1em was usually
>sufficient. From a typographical point of view this also
>makes a lot more sense. It may very well be that the
>above setting allows quite horrible solutions.

Look, one of us needs to sit down and play with this for a while.  I
put .25\hsize because Knuth says "By setting \emergencystretch high
enough (based on \hsize) you can be sure that the \tolerance is
never exceeded;...".  In my opinion his explanation of \emergencystretch
is not very easy to interpret in practical terms, so let's dust off
our TeXs and start getting empirical.

Dominik