Why does latex stretch small sections across the whole page vertically?

Question

I'm writing my bachelor-thesis and have a couple of small sub-sub-sections explaining conversions, like in the following

\subsubsection*{Assignment}

This document only explains non-compound assignments. The other kind, i.e \texttt{a += b},
is supported by the language too, but is not yet implemented. 

\begin{itemize}
\item If the first is an \texttt{auto} variable, no conversion takes place when assigning
      the right hand side to the variable designated by the left hand side. 
\item Otherwise, an assignment conversion takes place converting the given value to the type
      of the designated variable. 
\item Assignment requires an lvalue as the left hand side, and yields an lvalue result. 
\end{itemize}

\subsubsection*{Multiplication}
% ...

But latex renders it quite ugly with much space in between the items. I think it does so to fit the whole page. How can I tell it not to do so? Is what I'm doing right at all?

Answer 1

LaTeX uses \flushbottom for two-sided documents (book by default). Odd pages and even pages are forced to be aligned. In one-sided documents (article, report by default) LaTeX uses \raggedbottom, extra spaces will gone. cf. classes document.

You can use \raggedbottom if you meet too many bad page breaks. However, it is preferred to prevent big boxes in your document. Use floats instead of put big tabulars and figures directly. For lists and section titles, it is often not too serious, be sure you put enough text for each sections.

Answer 2

Then you have something on the same page which cannot be typeset in a good way, like large images or equations without a possibilty for a page break. However, write into the preamble

\raggedbottom

to allow ragged page bottoms

Answer 3

End your section/paragraph with \vfill.
This will "eat up" all the vertical whitespace after the text, making the text normally spaced. You will, however, get a (possibly big) area without anything, so use with caution. For some cases it works well.