[texhax] latex help? ["shortisch formula"]

[Uwe Lück]

... as so often, a shortcoming of my suggestion comes to my mind
-- sorry -- yet I'm proposing something new.

At 23:02 06.04.06, Karl Berry wrote:

>     So what I need is a way of telling latex to write the mbox on a new
>     line if the previous line cannot contain it properly.
>
>I think what's happening is that an unbreakable formula, even a shortish
>formula, is simply a hard thing to break lines around.  When TeX keeps
>it at the end of the line (making a too-long line), I think it's because
>it sees every alternative as worse.  To test this theory, try doing
>\begin{sloppypar}
>Your entire paragraph ...
>\mbox{$V=ZI$}
>... rest of paragraph
>\end{sloppypar}
>
>And see if it moves down.  (I expect the spacing will be pretty awful.)
>
>If this works out, since you don't want to use sloppypar around every
>paragraph, the real solution might be to adjust some of TeX's line
>breaking parameters, notably \tolerance, to allow looser paragraphs in
>general.
>
>By the way, I believe you can prohibit all breaks in formulas by setting
>\relpenalty=10000
>\binoppenalty=10000
>
>However, you probably have other (displayed) equations where you really
>do need to allow breaks at relations and operators, in which case this
>wouldn't be the way to go.

One problem of TeX I often wonder about is that it produces
so many "overful" lines. (I wonder that it produces overful lines
at all.) So my previous suggestion will produce overful lines
again -- I'm afraid. I strongly endorse my suggestion, yet it
is not complete. Karl's sloppypar suggestion probably should
be combined with my suggestion. Yet it doesn't seem perfect
to me. `sloppypar' concerns some parameters that might better
be considered language- (etc.) dependent. (For German, different
parameters have been suggested ... I have not investigated this
matter.)

Good luck,
   Uwe.