Overfull box and broken pagination with page that contains only section headings

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" types 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.