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What does the actual phrase above mean?
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marked as duplicate by Au101, egreg Oct 15 '16 at 16:39
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99 times out of 100 it means you have \\ incorrectly placed at the end of a paragraph. But to dissect the message:
Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 4--5
A box is underfull if there is not enough content to fill its stated size.
If you go \hbox to 5cm{A} then it makes a horizontal box (\hbox) 5cm wide just containing an A so it is underfull and will generate a warning, the exact amount of badness depends how much any white space is over-stretched, but here there is no white space so it is infinitely bad, which is arbitrarily truncated to the maximum value, 10000.
By placing \\ at the end of a paragraph you force a line break but there is nothing at all in the forced final line of the paragraph so it is a box that is \textwidth wide with no content. It appears a bit like vertical space but it is not it is a spurious line at the end of the paragraph. So for example it does not stretch and is not dropped at the start of a page.
answered Oct 15 '16 at 16:35
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Thank you for that well and clearly explained answer to my question. – Charles Boehm Oct 16 '16 at 9:46
