Preventing line shrinking with raggedright

Question

Sometimes with \raggedright, if a line is too long, but only slighly so, it will be shrunk instead of broken up. Here is an example:

\documentclass{article}
\raggedright
\begin{document}
This is a line that is shrunk to fit the page width despite the use of raggedright. 
This is a line that is shrunk to fit the page width despite the use of \ldots
\end{document}

Is there a way to prevent this? In particular, I want all text in my document to be ragged right, and I want to make sure that everywhere in the document, text is never shrunk (neither stretched, but this is never an issue with ragged-right text).

I would not have guessed that as standard behavior. Good observation! — Steven B. Segletes, Feb 07 '14 at 00:21

score 7 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

7

You could fix the inter-word spacing using some ideas from Fixed-width interword space:

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\raggedright
\begin{document}
This is a line that is shrunk to fit the page width despite the use of raggedright.

This is a line that is shrunk to fit the page width despite the use of \ldots

\begingroup
\spaceskip=1\fontdimen2\font
\xspaceskip=0pt\relax % just to be sure
This is a line that is shrunk to fit the page width despite the use of raggedright.

This is a line that is shrunk to fit the page width despite the use of \ldots
\endgroup

\end{document}

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

Community

1

answered Feb 07 '14 at 00:25

Werner

603,163

This doesn't exactly answer my question. The proposed solution fixes spaces to one size for every font type and size in the document. – RaggedRight Feb 07 '14 at 03:11
@RaggedRight: Sure. If you wish, one can add the specifics to \normalfont. However, I've grouped in the example, limiting the scope. If this answer doesn't solve your bigger problem, perhaps consider asking a follow-up question. – Werner Feb 07 '14 at 03:32

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 07 '14 at 00:46

1

I think I have found a possible answer to my own question. Apparently, TeX uses \pretolerance and \tolerance to decide if line breaking is acceptable. Setting \pretolerance = 0 seems to produce the desired behaviour (setting \tolerance = 0 does not). I am not sure how this works, or whether it will still work for other, more complicated examples, but it seems like an optimal solution for this simple example.

answered Feb 07 '14 at 00:46

RaggedRight

91

There is some discussion about \pretolerance in the TeX Book (Chapter 14: How TeX Breaks Paragraphs into Lines, p 96; alternatively, search for \pretolerance in texbook.tex). – Werner Feb 07 '14 at 00:55
Setting \pretolerance to 0 imposes stricter limits on badness of lines; it doesn't really guarantee that shrinking of interword spaces is avoided. – egreg Feb 07 '14 at 01:03

Preventing line shrinking with raggedright

2 Answers2