Smarter latex justification to avoid large spaces

Question

The default format in latex for paragraphs is fully justified, where the first word of a line touches the left margin and the last word of a line is flush with the right margin.

This is nice for lines that are about as long as the width of the text area, but if there are few words, LaTeX will create large amounts of whitespace between the words so they touch both sides.

In a document editor like Word or Writer, when I set the format to fully justified, this only applies to lines within a certain range of the edge as in almost every line is fully justified unless a line is specifically shorter and in that case appears left justified.

Here's an example image comparing the two:

Is there a way to do the equivalent justification in LaTeX?

Answer 1

You are most likely loading a package or manually setting the value of \parfillskip. The definition of \parfillskip, from TeX for the Impatient (section on Shaping paragraphs, p 111):

This parameter specifies the horizontal glue that TEX inserts at the end of a paragraph. The default value of \parfillskip is 0pt plus 1fil, which causes the last line of a paragraph to be filled out with blank space. A value of 0pt forces TEX to end the last line of a paragraph at the right margin.

As an example, this is the effect:

\documentclass{article}
\newcommand{\fourscore}{\noindent Four score and seven years ago our fathers 
  brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, 
  and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.\par}
\begin{document}
\fourscore
\setlength{\parfillskip}{0pt}
\fourscore
\end{document}

So, restoring it can either be done by finding the "offending" package, or adding

\setlength{\parfillskip}{0pt plus 1fil}

to your preamble. Without more information, it's difficult to assess how else to fix the problem.

Answer 2

I had the same problem but the solution that was propose did not work for me. I had spent hours trying to remove these unwanted gaps in the text. I would like to share how I solved my problem, for those who are still having this issue.

I used latex for my thesis and when I ended a paragraph, I used \linebreak command but it was a huge mistake that took hours to figure out. If you are using \justify command to fully justify your text in your document, then use \\ to end your paragraphs not \linebreak. With just this small change, all your unwanted spaces are removed.

Hope this helps for some of you still having this problem!