# What is a “Overfull \hbox (9.89561pt too wide)”?

I have this warnings around, some of them seems to be solved naturally but I never really understand what do they mean.

What this means?

Edit: I would like to keep the question in more general terms, but in this particular case the source code related to this warning is the following:

\item {\bf Finalização} onde são finalizados os histogramas, eventualmente traçadas curvas de ajuste \emph{(fit)} e guardados os resultados no disco.


Possible duplicate: This question solves the debug issue of this.

PS: Sorry if this question is quite newbie.

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In simple words, it means you have a line of text that is too wide (9.8961pt too wide to be precise) to fit in one line, so the program tries to break it unsuccessfully, hence the warning. –  Mario S. E. May 2 '13 at 15:00
But the generated pdf has this line just has expected (I will put the corresponding source in the question) –  RSFalcon7 May 2 '13 at 15:04
not really. What happens is that 9.89561pt = 3.49mm, which is almost nothing for the naked (inexperienced?) eye to see. –  Mario S. E. May 2 '13 at 15:07
@MarioS.E. 9.89...pt is, in Computer Modern @10pt, almost the width of one-and-a-half ms. There might be people unable to see that with the naked eye, but what these people need isn't experience, but new glasses ;) –  Nils L May 2 '13 at 15:18
@RSFalcon7 It's important because the hyphenation of each word is given according to the language –  Mario S. E. May 2 '13 at 20:07

The allowed space between two words is given by the interwordspace and interwordstretch. If it is not possible to set a paragraph with these lengths (with hyphenation) TeX will complain with a overfull or underfull box. Setting the \emergencystrech to a value greater than 0pt it can stretch the interwordspace to a bigger value. You can set this value individually or using \sloppy or the environment sloppypar

\documentclass[draft]{article}
\usepackage[textwidth=4.5cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\parindent=0pt
\begin{document}
interwordspace: \the\fontdimen2\font \
interwordstretch: \the\fontdimen3\font \
emergencystretch: \the\emergencystretch\par
\blindtext

\newpage
\begin{sloppypar}
interwordspace: \the\fontdimen2\font \
interwordstretch: \the\fontdimen3\font \
emergencystretch: \the\emergencystretch\par
\blindtext
\end{sloppypar}

\end{document}


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