[texhax] could someone give me an explanation as to why fontsize fails with an overfull box

[Peter Flynn]

On 11/01/2019 13:06, David Carlisle wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jan 2019 at 12:39, Carlos <linguafalsa at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Your examples made me tweak some more with the document and rather
>> than having values such as \font = 1.12 or \font = 0.99 or \font =
>> 1.05,  null it all out instead.
>
> I was going to ask why you had such strange settings, you should
> almost never have any use of \fontsize in a document.

I agree. \fontsize belongs in a document class or style package, where
the designer has specified certain settings. You could also use it in
one-off graphic applications like posters, but in a normal text document
it has virtually no place.

On 11/01/2019 13:54, Philip Taylor wrote:
> David Carlisle wrote:
>> There are no hyphenation points on "other" (the English hyphenation
>> settings don't allow any word to break after one letter like o-ther)
>
> [...] however, Collins Gem Dictionary of English Spelling (includes
> complete hyphenation guidance) allows "oth+er".  Thus there is
> precedent for \hyphenation {oth-er} if one wishes to allow the word
> to be broken.
Newspaper and magazine hyphenation exceptions allow this, but they are a
special case because their measure is often very narrow.

> At some other time I will write the diatribe which is lurking in my
> head  — "Why I loathe LaTeX, and why \sloppy exemplifies everything that
> is wrong with it [1]".

Would you be able to submit this to the MarkupUK conference (8/9 June)?
I think it would have an excellent reception. Or perhaps to Balisage. Or
even TUGboat.

///Peter