Overfull box and broken pagination

Question

I'm working on a large document in Emacs (23.2.1) org-mode (7.8.06) which I export to LaTeX. At present, the outline/structure of the document has been created, but not any of the content. The LaTeX version (which consists of \section, \subsection, \subsubsection and items mainly) has broken pagination, a blank page and text that runs off the page.

I shortened the document by moving \end{document} around to try to find the problem. In some cases, the document rendered correctly. This seems to be related to too many "section"-type headings in LaTeX with no content.

To test this, I added:

\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}

to my document and then inserted \blindtext "content" for most of the sections/subsections. The document now renders correctly.

The documentclass is article and the only package loaded is hypperref.

Are there any known issues with pdflatex/pdftex where a document contains only/mainly section headings and not much, if any, content? The only relevant error message pdflatex generated was:

Overfull \vbox (333.44125pt too high) has occurred while \output is active [5] [6]

I'm using pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian).

An example can be found here. The only required package is hyperref.

Answer 1

A document that consists only of headings, e.g., \section, \subsection, etc. does not have any legal breakpoint. Thus you get a single huge page. Or more exactly you get a single empty page followed by another page containing all your headings because LaTeX has (for technical reasons) a legal breakpoint at the beginning of a document. This breakpoint is never being used as long as there is another breakpoint in the remainder of the first page.

LaTeX doesn't break between a section and the first line (or rather 2 lines) of a following paragraph, and if a heading is followed immediately by another heading a break between them is also disallowed to avoid having a heading at the bottom of a page.

So you need to get some breakpoints into it, either by putting some bits of text in or by putting \pagebreak[1] before some or all \section commands.

Once you fill your document with real text you can then remove them again.

Answer 2

Normally you don't want a page break directly after a \section title. So LaTeX inhibits it there. It can't know that you want them now and so you get overfull pages as LaTeX can't find a point to break the page. And an \mbox{} or some arbitrary text after some of the heading commands.