[texhax] Turning off bad box messages

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Chris" == Chris Bergstresser <chris at subtlety.com> writes:

  > Hi all -- 
  > I'm writing a package which has to put a lot of stuff in specific
  > places on a page, and TeX is proving to be near impossible to work
  > with.  The latest hassle is the tons of overfill hbox warnings
  > that get spit out to the console when it runs.  I can't figure out
  > where the errors are coming from, because TeX won't tell me the
  > line in the package file, just the line in the source that calls
  > the package file, so I have little idea where they are or how to
  > fix them.  And there's no errors, visually, in the output file.

If you want to know where the problem occurs, you can always copy
parts of your package file into your source file.

Suppose TeX complains about an overfull \hbox in line 7.

Line 7 contains the macro \foo.

Replace \foo by the content of \foo.  Then error messages will be more
helpful. 

  > How can I turn off the warnings?  

I don't think that it is a good idea to turn off the messages.  It's
much better to find out what caused them.

If you are using LaTeX, try the draft option (\documentclass[draft]...).
It will put a black rectangle at the end of each overfull \hbox.
In plain TeX \overfullrule=5pt is the default.

  > I tried changing \hfuzz \tolerance and \hbadness as suggested in
  > "A Gentle Introduction to TeX" but that doesn't suppress all of
  > them, and changes the behavior of TeX to boot.  How can I fix
  > this?

You make TeX very happy if you set \hfuzz=\maxdimen \tolerance=10000
\hbadness=10000 because you allow it to do what it wants.  Otherwise
it has to provide good output which is very hard work, especially if
the values of the parameters you mentioned are quite small.

If you don't find a solution, please send us a minimal file which
describes this problem.  What we need is a small source file which
contains one macro which causes an overfull \hbox and the definition
of this macro.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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