Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
sudo in Windows.Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
Context: LaTeX is a typesetting system. When compiling a document, a lot of really in-depth debugging information is printed, which can be borderline incomprehensible to anyone but LaTeX experts. It can also be a visual hindrance when looking for important information like errors.
A "hbox" in TeX is a horizontal box. In 99% cases when laying out text, it's a line of text. "Underfull hbox" means "I couldn't stretch the content of this line far enough, so it will look janky as f due to the increased spacing". "Overfull hbox" means "Well, I tried my best to hyphenate and line-terminate, but this word will stick out of the margin and will look stupid as f."
Most of the time this is caused by a word that auto hyphenation can't deal with. You need to add a manual hyphenation exception. I can't remember how to do that, sorry, because it's been a while and also I'm mildly drunk, sorry.
Use entr it's a godsend! It watches when you write a buffer and then runs a command, which can be a script. Save your LaTeX often, and you never ger those errors!
For vim users, there's also vimtex, which, on top of doing what entr does, has a "quick fixes" feature that basically creates a split with a concise list of errors that's much more readable than pdflatex (or similar) output
Latexmk has built-in option to watch a Tex file and recompile upon changes.
I have completely abandoned latex for typst at this point.
I'm still waiting for Quarto and the R ecosystem to better support Typst.
I'm not familiar, what's Quarto?
https://quarto.org is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system. You write markdown text and it converts it to HTML website, PDF article/book, word document and many other formats.
Thank you for sharing, typst looks awesome.
If you work with LaTeX for five years and still have no idea what a hbox is or what that message means, you should not consider naming this "experience".
Ok, go on then, tell the class what underfull hbox is. And no googling!
I already explained this in my post of yesterday in this thread. I've been the TeX admin at our university in my student times. I've been creating styles and \shipout macros. I know this stuff inside out. Heck, I've even read good parts of the source to understand some finer points.
"Using LaTeX" and "programing with LaTeX" are very different things. For most people, LaTeX is a means to an end, for you LaTeX is your whole job. You're the exception, and exception can not be an example.
And you're expecting everyone to have this amount of experience?
Well, you can use a tool, and acquire just enough knowledge to use it without too many accidents. And then simply give up on progressing any farther. Or you can keep digging into the mountain of knowledge to improve your skills farther and deeper. It is always your choice.
But of course, how else could you describe yourself as having experience with TeX? /s
I think our TeX savvy lemming here confuses a knowledge level in the expert/consultant sphere with "having experience".
Having worked with LaTeX on and off for 15 years, and on occasions developing TeX macros (ie copy pasting stuff from stackoverflow and shotgun debugging it until it sorta works) and creating various graphics with PGF/TikZ, I would describe myself as having extended experience with the TeX environment. But I still can't tell you exactly what causes \hbox underfull without looking it up... Probably because it's never caused a failure to output my documents.
Yes? Experience and skill are good things and should be encouraged!
I'd rather use TeXmacs or LyX to avoid typing in obscure commands and whatnot
Thats why you should learn Ancient Egyptian
APL, same difference.