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TeX's Knuth-Plass algorithm breaks paragraphs globally, trading memory and latency for even typographic color. Here's how boxes, glue, cubic badness, and three escalating passes actually work — and how to debug them.
When compiling a TeX document you may notice that some lines are too tight, others too loose, or that TeX reports an overfull \\hbox warning. This happens because TeX must decide where to break each paragraph into lines.
TeX's Knuth–Plass algorithm optimizes whole paragraphs at once instead of breaking lines greedily. Here's how the tolerance and emergency-stretch knobs work, with a narrow-column example.
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