How to do it...

You can start with any document. We will optimize it with settings in the preamble. If you don't have one at hand, you can take one from the code package for this book, specifically for the first chapter, or download one at http://latex-cookbook.net. Let's proceed:

How it works...

With the babel package, LaTeX uses the hyphenation patterns for the chosen language. Even for the English language it could be useful. As you have seen, the babel package can additionally load the handy ngerman shortcuts for hyphenation commands. You can find such shorthand commands in the babel manual. You can open it by typing the texdoc babel command in Command Prompt, or you can find it online at http://texdoc.net/pkg/babel.

The modern font encoding T1 improves the situation further. When TeX and LaTeX were introduced, fonts did not contain glyphs for accented characters. They were printed as two characters, one being the actual accent. That's bad for copying and pasting from the final PDF output. It also interfered with hyphenation.

The default encoding is called OT1, and covers 128 glyphs, which means that it encodes 128 characters. T1 provides 256 glyphs, so many accented characters are included. That's why T1 is recommended for Western European languages. There are further encodings for other languages, such as for Cyrillic and for Asian languages. If you would like to work with them, take a look at the fontenc manual by typing the texdoc fontenc command in Command Prompt, or you can read it online at http://texdoc.net/pkg/fontenc.

Finally, we let the microtype package apply micro-typographic extensions. For example, the font size, even of single letters, might be scaled a little bit in favor of better full justification. You hardly can notice this with the naked eye, but you can see the effect of less hyphenation and better overall greyness of the text. Therefore, there should be smaller white gaps between words.

Furthermore, the microtype package subtly adjusts punctuation at the margin for better optical alignment, instead of just mechanical justification.