Left-justified text appears not to properly be aligned

Question

If I have this:

\end{multicols}
\hrulefill
\begin{flushleft}
    \textbf{
        TOTAL FINANCIAL OUTLAY
        \newline
        \$66,179.62USD and \$9,634.31CAD
    }
\end{flushleft}
\pagebreak

It renders like so:

With the dollar sign to the left of the 'T' in 'Total'. This looks and feels 'off' to me. I can't figure out why it does that, and how to have it left-align both sentences properly. Note they're both contained in the \begin{flushleft}[...]\end{flushleft}

I'm generating a PDF with pdflatex.

Welcome to TeX.SX! Add a % after \textbf{ to comment the implicit space added by the line end: \textbf{% — Phelype Oleinik, Nov 06 '19 at 21:54
Ah, that did it. I had tried putting the text on the same line and hadn't noticed that it had resolved the issue, so I had changed it back. Thank you. If you submit your comment as an answer I will accept it right away. — Harv, Nov 06 '19 at 21:57
This question explains the proper use of %: Where are the necessary places to be appended with % to remove unwanted spaces? — barbara beeton, Nov 07 '19 at 00:32

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 06 '19 at 22:05

Under normal circumstances TeX understands a (single) line break as a space. That's why writing:

hello
world

produces "hello world" in the PDF output. The same rule goes with:

a\textbf{
  TOTAL
}b

which will output a TOTAL b.

The usual way to circumvent this space added by TeX is to comment out the line end. This code:

a\textbf{%
  TOTAL%
}b

produces aTOTALb (note that spaces at the beginning of the line, before TOTAL, are ignored).

However since you are making the entire contents of the environment bold, I'd suggest you use \bfseries instead of \textbf, so you don't have to worry about that. I'd also use a blank line instead of \newline:

\begin{flushleft}
  \bfseries
  TOTAL FINANCIAL OUTLAY

  \$66,179.62\,USD and \$9,634.31\,CAD
\end{flushleft}

(You don't need to add a % after \bfseries because TeX ignores spaces after command names.)

Left-justified text appears not to properly be aligned

1 Answers1