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this is probably a redundant question, although I haven't found the answer of it on TEX or the internet. I have the following warning messge:

Badbox line 1 "Underfull \vbox (badness 1270) has occured while \output is active []"

Now the problem now is, how can I see which box is actually causing this problem? Line 1 does not show a box, it shows my section heading, but if I delete all the body of that heading, I have no badbox warning.

It seems that the error messages are not pointing me towards the culprit, anyone any ideas how I can find the culprit?

Thanks!

Snowflake
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    badbox line is not a tex error message but is presumably the message filtered through your editor. "in the output routine" means (usually) the problem is in the page head, which may be using text from your section headings in some classes. – David Carlisle Feb 23 '15 at 12:37
  • Look into .log file. If the "Underfull/Overfull box" is warned then the contents of the box is listed in the .log file. – wipet Feb 23 '15 at 12:57
  • @wipet latex sets defaults of \showboxbreadth=-1 \showboxdepth=-1 – David Carlisle Feb 23 '15 at 13:16
  • It seems that LaTeX brings problems (as usually:). OP must set \showboxbreadth=50 \showboxdepth=50 and then he/she can read my first comment here. – wipet Feb 23 '15 at 13:39
  • @wipet I thought you'd appreciate that:-) – David Carlisle Feb 23 '15 at 13:44

1 Answers1

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The format you show is from your editor rather than TeX however the original TeX warning message will be in the log.

By default it will just show the box contents as [] but if you put

\showboxbreadth=50 
\showboxdepth=50

Near the top of the file it will show a representation of the box contents (one line per character, so can be quite verbose, but if you need to see more, increase 50, or use \maxdimen)

As it is in the output routine the error doesn't directly relate to a line in your file but to a failure by Tex to make up a page correctly.

Overfull boxes in the output routine are usually related to the page head, for example trying to fit a two line chapter title into a page heading that only takes one line.

But as it is underfull I would guess that it is the page body that is underfull. The usual way to get that is to have \textheight that is not exactly \topskip plus a multiple of \baselineskip then if there is no stretchy white space on the page to compensate, TeX can not fill the page, the page is short but can not stretch, but adding one line would make it over-full. In such a case TeX chooses to leave the page short but make a warning.

David Carlisle
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  • The two line are usefull to understand overfull error but a lots less for underfull because it doesn't have a lot to show. Is it possible to also show parent content ? – Matheod Aug 06 '19 at 03:53