[texhax] overfull lines, hyphenation - setup for automatic processing

Donald Arseneau asnd at triumf.ca
Tue Jul 7 12:33:45 CEST 2009


james mourton <mourtonj at googlemail.com> writes:

> I'd like to generate documentation from various XML sources
> and create a PDF output using TeX (preferably ConTeXt, possibly LaTeX).
> I need the system to run automatically, without user interaction.
> 
> By default, if TeX does not know how to hyphenate words and break lines
> nicely, it leaves it to the user.

That is not true, depending on what you mean by the "user".  Which 
human languages TeX knows how to hyphenate can be changed by configuration.
A TeX system will be pre-configured to hyphenate many languages (because
memory is cheap these days).  The "user" could re-configure it.


> Could you please advise, how to tell TeX not to be so fussy

In LaTeX, declare \sloppy.  The opposite is -- you guessed it -- \fussy.

> 2) Hyphenation
> Is there any way how to fall-back to more aggressive hyphenation rules

If you never see hyphenations then you have misconfigured TeX, or switched to
a language that TeX doesn't hyphenate, or set an infinite \hyphenpenalty, or
declared an invalid \hyphenchar, or some other mistake.

> 3) Error reporting
> Another issue is, that texexec
> creates very ugly table (\bTABLE) with overlapping text in the cells,
> but does not report any problem.
> Is there any way how to make it fail loudly, so the problems can
> be detected?

I don't see many Context afficionados on this list, but I understand
there is an active Context mailing list.


-- 
Donald Arseneau                          asnd at triumf.ca


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