I often see output from TeX with the warning overfull hbox, badness 10000. What does this message mean?

  • 18
    they are "seeding" which means asking and answering their own questions to build a nice bedrock of "good" questions so that newbies to the site will have good examples. – BBischof Jul 26 '10 at 19:48
  • 9
    Aye! The whole point of the private beta is to seed answers to questions that we anticipate may be common. Answering your own question is perfectly acceptable if you have a good answer but no one has bothered to ask the question yet. – Sharpie Jul 26 '10 at 20:18
  • 9
    Yes, but! Please do give some time before answering so that others have a chance as well. This also has the effect of producing novel answers which you might have not known otherwise! meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4/… – Juan A. Navarro Jul 28 '10 at 16:45
  • 4
    Possible duplicate of What are underfull hboxes and vboxes and how can I get rid of them? – Teepeemm Jul 28 '16 at 21:49
  • 7
    How can this be a duplicate of a question about underfull boxes? – egreg Jul 28 '16 at 23:15

You can control how the overfull hbox, badness work configuring these latex parameters explained on:

  1. badness is an integer from 0 to 10000 that is a measure of the quality of the spacing in any given box. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/definition/badness

  2. \tolerance A parameter that tells TeX how much badness is allowable without error. [number] can range from 0 to 10000, and there are no units. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/tolerance

  3. The TeX primitive \pretolerance is an integer parameter that is used in TeX's line breaking algorithm as described below. The quantity is an integer from -1 to 10000.


    If \pretolerance is -1, then TeX bypasses the first attempt at breaking a paragraph without hyphenation. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/pretolerance

On these questions there are more related information about line breaking:

  1. What is the meaning of \fussy, \sloppy, \emergencystretch, \tolerance, \hbadness?
  2. What's the difference between \tolerance and \badness ?
  3. Why is Latex hyphenating some words automatically, but others dont?
  4. Long blank space in the middle of paragraph


  1. Is it still worthwhile to let TeX try line-breaking without hyphenation?
  2. How to add global hyphenation rules?
  3. How to manually set where a word is split?

Bad boxes:

  1. Do I have to care about bad boxes?
  2. How to avoid using \sloppy document-wide to fix overfull \hbox problems?
  3. Overfull hbox - How do I fix this?

Table of Contents:

  1. Fixing overfull hbox in table of contents removes too many dots
  2. Memoir mysterious overfull hbox in TOC when mathptmx is used
  3. Overfull \hbox warning for TOC entries when using memoir documentclass
  4. titletoc: section titles ragged right
  5. How to typeset the table of contents raggedright in memoir?
  6. Table of contents: section titles ragged right


  1. underfull \vbox
  2. What is the difference between \hspace*{\fill} and \hfill?
  3. how to suppress "Underfull \vbox (badness 10000) ... while \output is active"?
  4. http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-overfull.html (La)TeX makes overfull lines
  5. http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-paraparam.html Why does it ignore paragraph parameters?

The first answer doesn't really help somebody fix the problem, though. Take a look at:




to learn about \tolerance, \pretolerance, and \hyphenpenalty and how they affect the overfull/underfull behavior. Also, if you're fixing the document by hand, you can add hyphenation dictionary entries with \hyphenation or add discretionary hyphens into words with \-.


This message means that a line of your document is too long to fit within the horizontal space on the page, and TeX couldn't find a good way to break it apart. This will usually result in text hanging out past the margin, possibly even running off the side of the page. Common causes are long words without proper hyphenation information and long displayed equations.

  • 76
    If you use draft mode (\documentclass[draft]{article}) you can see black lines on the side of your document where there is overfull hbox badness. This is a convenient way to find and fix these errors. – Otis Jul 26 '10 at 19:54
  • 14
    @Otis: Or simply something like \overfullrule=1mm so that you don't get the unwanted side effects of the "draft" mode. – Jukka Suomela Jul 26 '10 at 20:34
  • 3
    Overfull hboxes are not limited to overlong lines on a page. A hbox can overflow anywhere, for example, inside a table. Whithout \overfullrule in effect this is often hard to detect. – Christian Lindig Apr 17 '11 at 5:06

Your Answer

