6

This is an issue that's been bothering me for a while. I'm interested in typesetting poetry on narrow pages. I'm using the verse package to set the poem and the geometry package to manage the page size. When the length of a line of text just reaches the margin, a vertical space is inserted below the line.

Here's my minimal example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[paperheight=10in,paperwidth=5in,margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{verse}
\begin{document}
\begin{verse}
% Works how I expect:
The quick brown fox jumped over the\\
Lazy dog.

% Make first line a bit longer, and now there is extra space between lines
The quick brown FOX jumped over The\\
Lazy dog.
\end{verse}
\end{document}

Picture

Gabe
  • 61

3 Answers3

7

As @tohecz has noticed that you have an overfull \hbox. This means that the line is longer than one line but TeX didn't find a suitable place to break the line and rather let the word stick into the margin.

Making the line yet a bit longer will show you why this produces »extra vertical space« – a new line begins, there's just nothing in it:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[paperheight=10in,paperwidth=5in,margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{verse}
\begin{document}

\begin{verse}
% Works how I expect:
The quick brown fox jumped over the\\
Lazy dog.

% Make first line a bit longer, and now there is extra space between lines
The quick brown FOX jumped over The\\
Lazy dog.

The quick brown FOX jumped over the the\\
Lazy dog.
\end{verse}

\end{document}

enter image description here

If you have no possibility of re-wording or changing the width of the document or the fontsize of the verse here is a compromise solution:

\begin{verse}
  The quick brown FOX jumped over \rlap{The}\\
  Lazy dog.
\end{verse}

\rlap{} let's its argument overlap to the right without having a width.

cgnieder
  • 66,645
3

The problem is that your line is longer than it should be, as it is indicated in the log:

Overfull \hbox (3.10588pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 11--12

Moreover, it is verified by the black square if you use \documentclass[draft]{article}

Of course, in case that your document has flaws, LaTeX won't behave predictably.

yo'
  • 51,322
  • »flaw« is a bit a strong word here: an overfull hbox for good reason is not an error but a warning and there actually are cases where the least bad alternative is to accept a little overfull hbox. A verse might actually be a good example for this: line breaks often are given by the verse structure and re-wording is out of the question. – cgnieder Aug 20 '14 at 09:50
  • 1
    Well, the standard thing to do is to put the word on the next line with double indent. I more think that verse should set its contents \raggedright; it doesn't make sense to right-justify them. This as well seems to be the typographical tradition, cf. for instance the Book of Psalms in most printed Bibles. – yo' Aug 20 '14 at 10:40
  • I don't argue that in almost all cases overfull boxes can be avoided. But there are rare occasions when alternatives should be considered and poems can (don't have to) be such exceptions... :) – cgnieder Aug 20 '14 at 10:49
0

As yo' suggested in a comment, adding a \raggedright declaration solved the issue for me. I'm really not sure why this isn't the default within a verse environment in the first place.

scorchgeek
  • 628