# Too wide line spacing?

Following the likelihood function
$$\prod_{i=1}^n E \lbrace B_{k_{i_1}} (x_{i_1}) B_{k_{i_2}} (x_{i_2}) \rbrace E [ A^2 \lambda_1^* (x_{i_1}) \lambda_2^*(x_{i_2}) \exp \lbrace -A \sum_{m=1}^2 \int_0^{x_{i_m}} \lambda_m^* (t) dt \rbrace ]$$


given in

The above is my LaTeX code and PDF output. I didn't manually put any line spacing but the space is too wide. Why is it so wide? How can I narrow this?

This equation is at the bottom of the page in the PDF file. Might it affect the line spacing?

• Yes, there is a glue which is stretched. You can put a \vfill after the equation to reduce the spacing, or some other text. – Astrinus Dec 25 '14 at 22:06
• one possibility is to use \raggedbottom, but this will affect the entire document. another is to follow this equation by \clearpage; this will leave the page short, and if anything changes earlier in the document, may have to be removed. – barbara beeton Dec 25 '14 at 22:11
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I would (a) break the equation across two lines, using the split environment of the amsmath package inside the equation environment, and enlarge the square brackets and curly braces and (b) provide the instruction \raggedbottom. In addition, I would exchange the order of square brackets and curly braces in the second part of the equation to create more parallelism to the equation' first part. To reduce the vertical separation between the two lines of the equations, one could use \smash[b]{...} and \smash[t]{...} judiciously.
\documentclass{article}
$$\begin{split} &\smash[b]{\prod_{i=1}^n} E \Bigl\lbrace B_{k_{i_1}} (x_{i_1}) B_{k_{i_2}} (x_{i_2}) \Bigr\rbrace \\ &\qquad \times E\biggl\lbrace A^2 \lambda_1^* (x_{i_1}) \lambda_2^*(x_{i_2}) \exp \biggl[ -A\smash[t]{\sum_{m=1}^2} \int_0^{x_{i_m}} \lambda_m^* (t) \, dt \biggr] \biggr\rbrace \end{split}$$