Where are those overfull/underful boxes and lines? Show me, I'm lazy!

Question

Sometimes I compile a document with a lot of overfull/underfull line/box messages, which fill up my terminal and I can't make heads or tails of them without very careful scrutiny & scrolling.

Is it possible to get pdfTeX to mark these boxes and lines somehow? Say, with a box of some color, a dot, an underline, a side-bar, etc.?

Answer 1

Yes, using the \overfullrule command in your preamble. This has to be set to a length (I usually set it to be ~5pt) and it prints out a black rectangle near overfull hboxes.

Here is an example (words are not meaningful, but this way they can't be hyphenated, thus creating overfull hboxes)

\documentclass{article}
\overfullrule=5pt
\begin{document}
adfhafashfk jahsdkjash kjsahdkjashdkjhshskjdhkjhdkjdsh qwioeuqwoieuoqwiueoiw kwlqjewqejoqwiejowqiejoqwjewoqiejowqej oqwj oeijwqoie jqwoj eiwoi jeowijewjeejejeejlwkkkkkwwllwlwlwlwwlwlwlwlwlw jkljdlajkslsadj
\end{document}

With the fantastic result:

About draft:

Sometimes it's not either advisable or useful providing a draft option to the class, otherwise some packages (e.g. microtype) do not work as they would in the final stages.

Answer 2

The log file gives the line number of the bad lines so your editor should be able to locate them in the source. in emacs for example this is optional: you can toggle (C-c C-w) TeX-toggle-debug-bad-boxes, and when this is on, after running latex the usual next-error command (C-x`) will step through bad boxes moving the cursor at point to each bad line in turn, as if it had had an error. Other editors presumably have similar features (but I only know about emacs)