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Originally Posted by ahi
Since inserting soft-hyphens at the right places is a more (the most?) elegant way of solving the overfull box problem, yes I do.
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The point is, LaTeX already knows where it's appropriate to put soft-hyphens, or if it doesn't, can be extended to. Without help from the book maker, it doesn't for some words, but if a book were properly made, the book maker would include rules for all the words LaTeX doesn't know (proper names, hand-made compounds, etc.). That should remove most overfull boxes, yes, but without hand-tweaking the individual lines. My point was that if the line length is small enough, sometimes it isn't enough, and then the problem isn't hyphenation at all, and there's little choice but to accept a few underfull boxes. LaTeX can be programmed to know all possible hyphenation points -- that won't entirely solve the problem, though.
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Fiddling with emergency stretch is on par with (if, perhaps, not as drastic as) putting everything in sloppypar. No?
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Yes, but the real effect is only that it's going to put up with more underfull boxes rather than stick things into the margins (create an overfull box), with is LaTeX's default way of annoying the user into hand-tweaking. With a full page size, usually inserting a new hyphenation rule is enough, but where it isn't, I don't see an option but to put up with underfull boxes. If we're going to be using very different line lengths and page sizes than has been typical in past typography, we're simply not going to be able to demand the same things.
And of course, relying on current rendering programs is in effect putting up with underfull boxes galore galore galore...