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I drafted a thesis in MS Word, using block sentence formatting. It looks very nice. Of course, for the final version, I'm going to use Latex, however when transitioning from MS Word to tex, pdftex (texlive) chose to hyphenate pretty much each word at the end of a line.. and complain alot where it couldn't.

Word manages to get along without hyphenation by adjusting the word spacing on each individual line, which imo looks better. Is there a way to achieve this in Latex?

EDIT: I'm not looking for a solution to "fix" hyphenation for words that would otherwise cause \hbox problems, I want to avoid hypenation alltogether by giving pdftex more freedom to add space between words.

EDIT2: Ok, people get a bit focused on my slight exaggeration of how often Latex/pdftex uses hyphenation. Please focus on the actual question: Can I disable hypenation by forcing latex/pdftex to adjust word spacing to fit the words, respecting hbox bounds. This way and not the way that is suggested in the "possible duplicates", which i read before posting this.

Xaser
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  • The word spacing in word looks awfull, I always either set text in wordraggedright, or enable hyphenation. Beside this load the package microtype, this should reduce the hyphenation. – Ulrike Fischer Jul 15 '16 at 20:18
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    I can guarantee you that Word’s none hyphenated block text does not look better that LaTeX’ hyphenated text. I suggest you load the package microtype in your preamble. – Sveinung Jul 15 '16 at 20:18
  • +Mico I do not know much about the architecture of LaTex, however i was hoping there was some parameter that I could set to relax pdflatex' word spacing to reduce / kill hyphenation. – Xaser Jul 15 '16 at 20:53
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    tex adjusts the spacing between words (and with micotype also the widths of letters) so without any example it is hard to guess what you are seeing and why (or if) there is a problem with the output. – David Carlisle Jul 15 '16 at 20:54
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    You could use \sloppy to allow more interword spacing and typically less hyphenation but as the name implies the result is a poorer typographic quality. – David Carlisle Jul 15 '16 at 20:55
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    I have a page with just one displayed formula and nine paragraphs, with a few short formulas. XeTeX hyphenates just five times in 44 lines. It doesn't seem “pretty much each word at the end of a line”. Without seeing an example, it's quite hard to say more; it may depend on the language: if it has very long words, hyphenation will be more frequent. However, Italian has long words, see the picture (click here) – egreg Jul 15 '16 at 21:45
  • please see EDIT2. – Xaser Jul 15 '16 at 22:50
  • http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5036/how-to-prevent-latex-from-hyphenating-the-entire-document definitely is a duplicate and Joseph's answer there tells you which methods are available. (Probably the other answers, too. I only checked Joseph's as it was on top.) I don't know what you mean by saying your way is different. Obviously, if you maintain the default justified block and don't hyphenate, LaTeX has to increase the interword spacing (unless you use microtype which will help slightly). You aren't using \hbox in regular text. You'll get more bad boxes unless you relax the rules. – cfr Jul 16 '16 at 00:43
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    But bad boxes are just warnings and you already know that you prefer what TeX thinks are bad boxes to what it thinks are good ones. To avoid the warnings, you can change various penalties so that TeX relaxes its typographic standards. You can't adhere to those standards and reduce the number of ways TeX can implement them unless you do something special e.g. rewriting parts of the document, using very large pieces of paper or very tiny fonts etc. – cfr Jul 16 '16 at 00:46

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