How can I tell Latex that I want my paragraph with n less lines? I saw a question some days ago, but after twenty minutes of heavy searching (I think), I found nothing.
There is a “penalty” or something like that which asks Latex to try to put the text in less lines. Something like \reducelines=-1 asks Latex (TeX) to reduce the number of lines by one.
I know this is a duplicate, but I can't find the “original” question.
There is a parameter \looseness: With \looseness=1 TeX will try to make the paragraph a line longer, with \looseness=-1, a line shorter. Also higher values can tried, but longer paragraphs would be useful for TeX to have a chance.
At the start or a paragraph, \looseness is reset to zero, see procedure normal_paragraph in tex.web (other parameters that are reset there are \hangindent, \hangafter, and \parshape).
At the end of the paragraph, \losseness is evaluated, when TeX breaks the paragraph into lines.
Therefore, \looseness should be placed inside the paragraph, e.g. right before the end:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer
adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vestibulum ut, placerat ac,
adipiscing vitae, felis.\looseness=-1
\looseness. But, this does not always succeed, depending on the contents of the paragraph, the possible break points, ...
– Heiko Oberdiek
Oct 30 '17 at 22:47
\looseness: for instance http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/146890/how-to-apply-looseness-1-to-all-the-paragraphs and http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/168611/which-choice-of-line-breaking-parameters-gives-the-minimum-number-of-lines – egreg Apr 26 '14 at 20:34number lines paragraph. When Werners answer explicitly says that, for instance. This is a duplicate, but I think those questions should be edited in a way future users will find the solution easier. The one I was looking for was @Aditya 's one. – Manuel Apr 26 '14 at 20:38