Context: LaTeX is a typesetting system. When compiling a document, a lot of really in-depth debugging information is printed, which can be borderline incomprehensible to anyone but LaTeX experts. It can also be a visual hindrance when looking for important information like errors.
A “hbox” in TeX is a horizontal box. In 99% cases when laying out text, it’s a line of text. “Underfull hbox” means “I couldn’t stretch the content of this line far enough, so it will look janky as f due to the increased spacing”. “Overfull hbox” means “Well, I tried my best to hyphenate and line-terminate, but this word will stick out of the margin and will look stupid as f.”
Most of the time this is caused by a word that auto hyphenation can’t deal with. You need to add a manual hyphenation exception. I can’t remember how to do that, sorry, because it’s been a while and also I’m mildly drunk, sorry.
Use entr it’s a godsend! It watches when you write a buffer and then runs a command, which can be a script. Save your LaTeX often, and you never ger those errors!
I have completely abandoned latex for typst at this point.
I’m still waiting for Quarto and the R ecosystem to better support Typst.
https://quarto.org is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system. You write markdown text and it converts it to HTML website, PDF article/book, word document and many other formats.
If you work with LaTeX for five years and still have no idea what a hbox is or what that message means, you should not consider naming this “experience”.
I already explained this in my post of yesterday in this thread. I’ve been the TeX admin at our university in my student times. I’ve been creating styles and \shipout macros. I know this stuff inside out. Heck, I’ve even read good parts of the source to understand some finer points.
I’d rather use TeXmacs or LyX to avoid typing in obscure commands and whatnot
