Strange microtype behaviour

Question

I am trying to use the microtype package as illustrated in this page: http://texblog.net/latex-archive/layout/pdflatex-microtype/.

But I am getting this output instead:

So any ideas why this is happening?

Here is the code as requested:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{microtype}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{3.7cm}
\blindtext
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

EDIT1: I just realize that there are some small literal differences between the blindtext output that I got and the blog's one. For example instead of what in the third line, there is a how. I am going to change my blindtext to match the blog's copy to see if there is some improvement.

EDIT2: Here are the result after I enabled \frenchspacing and made the blindtext corrections. Note that in the blog's example the "a" should be one line above its current position.

EDIT3: I updated my microtype package to version 2.5 beta-07 but I got no drastic changes.

Answer 1

It looks to me that there is an error on the blog and the original run done when the screen capture was taken was at a slightly wider minipage, possibly at 3.9cm or the microtype defaults file is different.

For very narrow columns, you are normally better off with the ragged2e package. Compare with this:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
%\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{3.4cm}
\blindtext
\end{minipage}
\end{document}