TeX should always give you warnings like "Overfull \hbox (0.43386pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 42--45" and the text of theaffected line when it "disrespects your margins", so I don't see why you have to check for them visually?
So this complaint of "I can't enforce that there are no margin overruns" is (to use the same word) actually something like "If I don't take any steps to avoid overruns, and moreover ignore the warnings that are specifically about overruns, then there are overruns". This complaint is not specific to you and is surprisingly common actually, which brings me to my main point, which is that the majority of people seem to use TeX/LaTeX without ever having read the manual. Some of them even joke about "incomprehensible" messages like "overfull hbox". But the whole point of TeX, what TeX is at its core, is this breaking-paragraphs-into-lines (in my view, the rest of TeX is just a large wrapper around this basic function of setting boxes).
The preface of the TeXbook describes it as "TeX, a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books", and for its initial design goals, it does make sense that it chooses by default to declare defeat in impossible situations and overflow margins with a warning to the user so that they can take appropriate action, instead of silently producing an "ugly" paragraph with lines subtly looser than whatever tolerance settings the user has specified. What is remarkable here is that a lot of people are using TeX who do not care about meticulous typesetting of "beautiful books" at all, and will blithely ignore warnings related to such matters.
The lesson may be that such a state of affairs is inevitable, so perhaps a better default for similar software today would be to produce loose lines to fit in the margin, so that results are good even for the users who don't read the manual, or even the warnings, or even proofread the final result.
Is this really remarkable? It's the standard tool for writing papers in physics. Get result, put into LaTeX, put on arxiv, repeat. The fact that these people have to constantly Google for obscure LaTeX incantations (faster than TeXbook) is not ideal for them. Indeed, it would be better if it were easier to use without reading a 500 page book.
Anyway, thanks for tip. When I googled for this I found only \sloppy, which did not produce reasonable results.
The only one I like is URW Garamond but it's a breeze to install and use and I think it stands head and shoulders above everything else. It also matches the math pretty well imho. I feel you though: Computer Modern is pretty ugly and most other fonts really clash with the math rendering by default.
Can you give more details about this? I’ve never heard this complaint before, nor noticed this myself.
Also, I’m not sure I understand what you are saying about “LaTeX editors”; I use Vim, and it works quite well.
But after a while I remembered the more fundamental point that bothered me:
> one might add that it's not just microtype that doesn't offer optical kerning -- it's structural limitations in TeX's typesetting that prevent it. To TeX, each glyph is contained inside a (I guess: black) box. TeX knows the outer dimensions of those boxes, but has no clue (and doesn't care) about what the glyph looks like that's inside it.
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/139926/optical-kerni...
And this led to bad spacing for hyphens, which led to me experimenting with manual kerning, which led to the issue that I recalled first.
Also, I am not really convinced of the merits of Vim for LaTeX. Most of my time writing is spent revising, which requires a lot of "random access edits," and I'm at least twice as fast at jumping to arbitrary locations on screen using a mouse as I am with vim (even with the usual tricks).
(I tend to think of vim as something that was purpose-built for programming in C and with usefulness inversely proportional to how far a given task is from that purpose. While I realize that's not entirely accurate, I've found it a good heuristic. Programming: vim works decently for me. General purpose writing: not so much.)
Further, the ability to control-click .pdfs and skip to the corresponding place in the .tex file, and vice versa, is an amazing convenience. I understand that there are technically ways to do this in vim, but then at that point I'm using the mouse a ton anyway and I don't really see the point of vim (which is usually proposed to be "hands don't go off keyboard = write faster" in my experience).
So, yes, I could survive if forced to use vim. I just wouldn't like it.
Given this, and given I feel I'm much more willing to experiment with these things than the average person writing papers in the physical sciences. I can't even imagine how the conversation would go if I tried to tell my 72-year-old advisor that TeXShop's not going to work anymore because he updated his computer and it's time to get friendly with the command line. These people want to do science, they don't want to learn vim shortcuts.
Boring details: TeX, as it comes from Knuth, reads TFM ("TeX Font Metric") files to supply this per-font information. Knuth's Computer Modern fonts do not contain any kerning pairs that contain dash characters, which one may be pleased or displeased about. Various enhanced-TeXs get font info from the OS or perhaps directly from, say, OpenType font files. If the ligature and kern info isn't passed into TeX from there properly, or doesn't exist in the font itself, then of course you won't get the results you're looking for.
That said, Adobe does have a proprietary optical kerning scheme that they use in their applications. But it's turned off by default (hint, hint), and their documentation is a bit defensive about it: "Optical kerning adjusts the spacing between adjacent characters based on their shapes, and is optimized for use with Roman glyphs. Some fonts include robust kern-pair specifications. However, when a font includes only minimal built-in kerning or none at all, or if you use two different typefaces or sizes in one or more words on a line, you may want to use the optical kerning option for the Roman text in your document." Loosely translated: Fonts from real type foundries have kerning pairs carefully created by their designers; if you have slap-dash one where they didn't bother, we'll do the best we can if you want. YMMV.
> (I tend to think of vim as something that was purpose-built for programming in C and with usefulness inversely proportional to how far a given task is from that purpose. While I realize that's not entirely accurate, I've found it a good heuristic. Programming: vim works decently for me. General purpose writing: not so much.)
I don't want to comment on the kerning stuff (I don't really know much about it). However, I found your comment about the merits of vim when revising interesting. Like you, I spend most of my time writing revising/correcting (often other peoples work), however my take on vim is just the other way around.
If I write a large text myself, it doesn't really matter what editor I use, it's when I revise/correct things that I love using vim. While you might be correct that you would be quicker to move to the appropriate spot using a mouse, I pretty much guarantee that all the gain is gone when you have to switch back to the keyboard to do your change. That's why I love vim for these kind of tasks, the moving and changing of specific text is such a seemless experience without even having to change the hand position on the keyboard. My productivity absolutely plummets every time I have to use word or some other editor for these sort of tasks.
I see! What I didn't say is that I'm working on a laptop, so the trackpad to keyboard distance is negligible – it's essentially just another big key. All I have to do is pivot my hand.
In case anyone else is wondering about this:
> The bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus."
When I want to change something nontrivial about the formatting or style, it's a nightmare. For example, there are zero mature fonts besides the default computer modern that also have math rendering that's aesthetically acceptable to me. And I forget the details, but typesetting is handled in such a way that the kerning around things like hyphens is broken. I've fixed it manually before in places where it was particularly egregious.
Also on this point: an ungodly number of hours are wasted every year by academics figuring out how to contort LaTeX so the resulting document complies with NSF grant specifications, which you must meet or be auto-rejected. In particular, NSF requires one-inch margins, but there's no way to force the typesetting engine to strictly respect the margins you set. So at the end you're left to turn the visual margin guides on and check there are no margin overruns, or you risk getting your proposal set to the trash (theoretically, at least).
I've also heard that LaTeX editors are development disasters with a bus factor of one. The NSF really ought to fund them, because if we wake up one day after the maintainers of all the popular editors die and Apple/Microsoft force an operating system update that breaks compatibility, paper writing in the physical sciences will grind to a halt.