TeX/tolerance

TeX

Synopsis

\tolerance=[number]

Description

A parameter that tells TeX's line-breaking algorithm how much badness is allowable in a paragraph. [number] can range from 0 to 10000, and there are no units.

As TeX breaks paragraphs into lines, the first attempt that produces acceptable results according to \tolerance are used; therefore, increasing this value will produce faster results, while allowing additional whitespace on each line.

Decreasing this value will improve the results of typesetting where better results are possible, but may also produce poor results with overfull boxes where no line-breaking combination can be found to meet this tolerance.

\tolerance should generally be set above \pretolerance, which attempts to set the paragraph without hyphenation if the results are good enough; setting without hyphenation is faster as fewer breakpoints must be considered.