Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ 12pt issues

[djo]

I've been using LaTeX for a while now, and I really like it. However, I've encountered a problem: when I increase the font size to 12pt I get all sorts of errors, mostly hbox and vbox ones.Is there an easy way to fix this? If LaTeX can't do something as simple as change the font size without complaining, I'll have to find other software.

[djo]

OK, I figured it out. I found (in little tiny print somewhere) that increasing parskip can fix this problem. I increased parskip to 2pt and now everything is good.
Things like this need to be made more obvious so newbies don't clog up the message board with simple questions.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi djo,

welcome to the forum!

No worries, that board is for talking. And also simple questions are nice - on one hand they are easy to answer, on the other hand users google the same and arrive here with googling that simple question&answer and may decide to join the board.

Stefan

[djo]

I spoke too soon. I added a couple of pages to the document in question and the vbox warnings came back. So, instead of setting parskip to 2pt I wound up with parskip set to 1em plus 4pt. This leaves ugly gaps between paragraphs, but the compiler seems to like it. What's going on? It doesn't seem that simply increasing the size of the font should cause problems like this.

\raggedbottom works, but (obviously) is not ideal.

[djo]

I've been paying attention to the typesetting of books I read, and it seems that \raggedbottom is the standard for professional work. Interesting.

[MjK]

it seems that \raggedbottom is the standard for professional work

Surely not. \raggedbottom for books is a workaround for those, who are not willing to do manual optimizations like moving floats, using \looseness, spare usage of manually added vertical space or \enlargethispage or \clearpage (mostly before a section) etc.

Maybe an equivalent to \raggedbottom is typically for the users of other software, because most of them do not know a lot about typography and how to obtain really good result. But unfortunately lots of LaTeX users do not differ a lot from those. And for me it is so much cost to teach everyone again and again and again. So usually I do not participate in such discussions. And so I should stopping with this thread too.

[djo]

The book that really did it for me was Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. He uses a lot of sections (like I do) and whomever typeset the book had no problem leaving blank space at the end of a page and starting a section on the next page.

Edit: Now I'm re-reading 1984. Same deal.