\raggedbottom considered harmful?

[Mary Ellen Foster]

I'm writing my Master's thesis with LaTeX2e... I wonder how many postings
here start out with similar sentences! :-)

Anyway, the university in its infinite wisdom wants things double spaced
and in a nice big font. My thesis also contains a fair number of figures.
This of course results in a bunch of "Underfull \vbox" warnings whenever I
latex my thesis, as LaTeX decides that it can't fit the beginning of a
section onto the bottom of a particular page, so it just stretches out the
linespacing of the text that actually appears on that page.

So. What's the recommended method of dealing with this? I realize I
shouldn't worry about pagebreaking until the final final copy is done, but
that time is coming near and some of the warnings are not going to go
away... for aesthetic reasons, I'd just like my thesis to latex without
warnings.

I see three basic alternatives:

1. I act like a newspaper copyeditor and painstakingly rewrite paragraphs
to add or delete lines so that everything works out perfectly -- *not*
tempting.
2. I stick "\raggedbottom" on the pages that cause problems, which causes
the warnings to go away. However, this feels like a kluge, and it will
also produce a bunch of pages with, well, ragged bottoms.
3. I stop being so picky and just live with the warnings and spaced-out
spacing. :-)

The first alternative is not one I care to contemplate; so, which of the
latter two is the more accepted way? Are ragged bottom margins acceptable
in a thesis? ... more or less acceptable than big gaps between paragraphs?
Is there some other option I'm missing here?

Thanks for your help,

MEF

--
Mary Ellen Foster, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Email: m...@cs.utoronto.ca Web: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~mef/
--------------------- Law of Software Envelopment: ---------------------
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

[Axel Reichert]

m...@cs.toronto.edu (Mary Ellen Foster) writes:

> Are ragged bottom margins acceptable in a thesis? ... more or less
> acceptable than big gaps between paragraphs?

IMHO yes. Big gaps between paragraphs emphasize these paragraphs for
no content-related reason. A ragged bottom is less disturbing and thus
recommended by some typographers, especially for heavily structured
text with lots of equations, figure etc.

Happy TeXing!

--
Axel Reichert -- http://mt.mpie-duesseldorf.mpg.de/people/reich/

[Robert Bernecky]

Francois Pitt has done a nice job of creating a ut-thesis class for just this
sort
of thing. It's available via ctan, or you could wander down the hall to
his office and ask him. If I can find it, I'll mail it to you separately.
Bob

Mary Ellen Foster wrote:

> IAnyway, the university in its infinite wisdom wants things double spaced