Thanks for the morning chuckle. Never thought I'd see an hbox joke :)

I, for one, have always preferred all of my `figs` at the end of the document anyway. ;)

That, my friend, is badness 10000.

I feel the overfull hboxes error is symbolic of everything that is wrong with LaTeX.

If I remember correctly, overful hbox error means that you must rearrange your text to produce pleasant render. If that's correct, then I'd argue that this error is everything that's right with LaTeX, because I hate with passion

    d o c u m e n t s        w i t h        h u g e        s p a c e s.

The huge spacing is actually an underfull hbox (i.e. TeX couldn't fill it enough, so had to stretch the spaces). An overfull box is a box where the contained text overflows the box; usually it's a line where the end juts into the margin, which is even uglier than the underfulls, IMO.

He was probably referring to the fact that preventing an overfull box without rearranging text is linebreaking too early, thus creating that excessive spacing. Also note that underfull boxes actually are a subjective thing; you cannot easily draw a line between "ok spacing" and "too wide". People will have different opinions on this, especially if they have no clue about typesetting they might not even realize it. So what (la)tex does here is quite clever in that it creates a layout that will make even the complete novice realize something is wrong. Of course then people can still ignore that but well, if you just don't care what your thesis looks like...

I really wish TeX would prefer underfull to overfull. So many times I've read two column documents where the author ignored the warnings and the columns overlapped, making things pretty hard to read. (Well, actual overlap is rare, but uncomfortably close is common.)

AFAIK, it does prefer underfull boxes to overfull ones,but sometimes the penalties work out such that it has to put in an overfull anyways (IME really long words that it doesn't know how to hyphenate correctly are usually the culprit, and it's more frequent in two-column than single column layouts). You can probably set it to be even stricter though by tweaking the penalties for underfulls and overfulls. The details escape me, but it's probably pretty easy once you find the right part of the TeX book to consult.

Assume that “quiet” means “not verbose”, not “silent”. Although I haven’t got it running yet I believe errors will still be written.

I have a python program that does nothing but filter latex output to remove all the cruft. On my latest paper, raw latex spits out 147 lines of nonsense. After my filter, I see about a dozen lines, including all meaningful errors and warnings and a four-line summary like this:

> Number of underfull warnings : 5 > Number of overfull warnings : 0 > Number of undefined references : 0 > Number of missing citations : 0

Do you have a link to said program?

It's just something I tossed together years ago and have been using ever since. Here it is if you are interested:

https://pastebin.com/9H7icgKJ