Question

I’m working on a report, and some elements are outside the margins (but some are just barely outside the margins). I was wondering: Is there a way to make two vertical lines, one on each side, along the margins so that one can easily see if it goes outside them?

(Googling it, I only found information about margin notes.)

A figure is below:

|report text goes here|
|more text goes also h|ere
|and so on and so fort|h

It would certainly make correcting these kinds of mistakes very trivial. 🙂

Feel free to post answers that would solve/show this problem in a more “LaTeX-correct” way, if that makes any sense at all.

Answer 1

Use the option draft in your \documentclass statement, e.g.:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,draft]{report}

This will produce a litte black box at the end of every overfull line (this is what Johannes Schaub must’ve been referring to in his comment). This makes it very easy to spot these
inconvenient overlong lines …

Alternatively, you can say \sloppy in your preamble. The typesetter will then be less strict on the grey value of your paragraphs and avoid “overfull \hbox”es more often (more frequent linebreaking).