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I am working on a book with Kannada and Devanagari scripts. I find something unusual with the opening of a new page (sometimes within the document only, not in every new page).

There's an unwarranted blank space right at the top. My understanding is that (Xe)LaTeX is trying to adjust the vertical space to best fit the contents.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/a5nD9.png

The following is an example of a page that "behaves good."

https://i.stack.imgur.com/v032Q.png

Possible solution

I can use \vspace{-3em} to get rid of the space [See the pic below]. But some automatic solution like giving a penalty or something would be nice. It seems too much to manually do this for each faulty page. I have much better experience of using LaTeX [w. r. t. automatic adjustment of vertical spacing of the lines] that I find such silly behaviour ridiculous.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/ObnVa.png

Please help me. This is an important service to my spiritual master. Regards.

EDIT: 19-Aug-2022

{\dev
paśyaitāṁ pāṇḍuputrāṇāmācārya mahatīṁ camūm ।

vyūḍhāṁ drupadaputreṇa  tava śiṣyeṇa dhīmatā ।।}


ಪಶ್ಯೈತಾಂ ಪಾಂಡುಪುತ್ರಾಣಾಂ ಆಚಾರ್ಯ ಮಹತೀಂ ಚಮೂಂ । \
ವ್ಯೂಢಾಂ ದ್ರುಪದಪುತ್ರೇಣ ತವ ಶಿಷ್ಯೇಣ ಧೀಮತಾ ।। \
vrgovinda
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    the space comes from lengths specified in your document but as you have shown no code it will be very hard to help. You could try adding \raggedbottom or show the result in the log of \showthe\topskip – David Carlisle Aug 18 '22 at 15:55
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    oh also if you use \\ at ends of paragraphs (with a warning of badness 10000) they could cause this and should all be removed. – David Carlisle Aug 18 '22 at 15:57
  • @DavidCarlisle : Can you please give your 2nd comment as an answer with some explanation? – vrgovinda Aug 19 '22 at 05:13
  • please do not edit aswers in to the question, it spoils the question/answer format of the site. You mark an answer by "accepting" it (which makes a big green tick, so no need to copy it to the question. – David Carlisle Aug 19 '22 at 11:51
  • Done. Thank you – vrgovinda Aug 20 '22 at 10:40

1 Answers1

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LaTeX is not doing anything ridiculous here it is simply following an explicit instruction in the source file, and at the same time warning that the output is bad, in fact badness 10000 its maximum measure of bad output.

\\ forces a line break so if you have


aaa

bbb\


ccc

then aaa and ccc are single line paragraphs but bbb is a two line paragrah just as if you had gone


aaa

bbb\ HERE


ccc

However the final line of the paragraph where HERE should be is empty so LaTeX screams about "underfull hbox" However it is still a line of text (with no text) in a 2-line paragraph so it affects page breaking the same way; counting as a line for widows and orphans and (as you see) not being dropped at a page break.

So the top of your page is not white space, it is the final text line of the paragraph from the prevous page, but that line is forced empty. Essentially an \hbox{} with no content is not "nothing" it is still a box.

See the last sentence in

What does the phrase "Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph" actually mean?

David Carlisle
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  • Actually, it is not the LaTeX program that is ridiculous, but my code that was. The \\\ at the end of every Kannada verse was the mistake that I did. It was expertly pointed out by @DavidCarlisle even without seeing the code. Special Credit to him – vrgovinda Aug 20 '22 at 10:41