<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'><br>----- Original Message -----<br>From: "Tom Sgouros" <tomfool@as220.org><br>To: texhax@tug.org<br>Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 2:49:56 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern<br>Subject: [texhax] penalties<br><br><br>Hi All:<br><br>I've never really had to mess with penalties in all the time I've used<br>TeX, but now I have to, and I don't really get how to go about it. I<br>have a long document (~150 pages), and there are only about four places<br>where the line-breaking isn't working right. But in those places, I<br>don't really know what to do. The FAQ suggests changing some penalties,<br>but the other 500 paragraphs look fine, and I don't want to make global<br>changes. I thought I could do this:<br><br> {\hyphenpenalty5000 Text of offending paragraph.}<br><br>Too sophisticated. I usually \hbox{the last two or three words,}<br>of the paragraph. I do that throughout the article, to avoid clubs.<br><br>But that seems to have no effect, whatever I set the value to. The FAQ<br>also suggests appending "\looseness=-1" to the last word of the<br>paragraph<br><br>\looseness is a great tool for page balancing, but it goes at the start of the paragraph<br>you are loosening. I always put it after anything else, but before \noindent.<br>If it doesn't work, that means that the linebreaking has not found any workable<br>values. I hunt for last lines that almost fill the page as indications that \looseness=1 will work<br>and use \looseness=1 on almost all paragraphs with short clubs.<br><br>I don't see how I could do page balancing without it.<br><br>Pierre MacKay<br></div></body></html>