Ties

When you always remember to use ties, you know that you are becoming TEXnically inclined. Ties are used to prevent LATEX from breaking lines at certain places. LATEX will always choose line breaks that result in the most aesthetically pleasing paragraph as judged by its stringent rules. But because LATEX does not actually understand the material it is setting so beautifully, it can make some poor choices.

A tie is the character ~. It behaves as a normal interword space in all respects except that the line-breaking algorithm will never break a line at that point. Thus

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Dr. Seuss should be typed as Dr.~Seuss
for this makes sure that LATEX will never leave the `Dr' at the end of one line and put the `Seuss' at the beginning of the next.

One should try to get in to the habit of typing ties first-time, not after waiting to see if LATEX will make a poor choice This will allow you to make all sorts of changes to your text without ever having to go back and insert a tie at a point that has migrated to the end of a line from the middle of a line as a result of those changes. Remember, of course, that the line-breaks

Here are some more examples of places where you should remember to place ties.

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Chapter~10 		 Donald~E. Knuth

Appendix~C width~2
Figure~1 function~f
Theorem~2 1,~2, or~3
Lemmas 3 and~4 equals~5