[texhax] hypenation matters, again

Barbara Beeton bnb at ams.org
Mon Aug 16 14:49:00 CEST 2004


    Following the recent thread on hyphenation, one of my users is asking
    about the converse issue: whereby TeX (LaTeX c.f. teTeX in this case) is
    hyphenating words he believes it shouldn't.

    Appended is an example list of words he has to override. Is my friend
    being too picky, or does he have a misconfiguration somewhere (which
    would undoubtedly be my fault; or perhaps his own settings, also appended).

    [...]

    \hyphenation{local}
    \hyphenation{together}
    \hyphenation{climates}
    \hyphenation{really}
    \hyphenation{appear}
    \hyphenation{issue}
    \hyphenation{Everett}
    \hyphenation{measure}
    \hyphenation{family}
    \hyphenation{applied}
    \hyphenation{senior}
    \hyphenation{autumn}
    \hyphenation{remained}
    \hyphenation{essay}
    \hyphenation{actions}
    \hyphenation{effort}
    \hyphenation{final}
    \hyphenation{either}
    \hyphenation{simple}
    \hyphenation{carried}
    \hyphenation{science}
    \hyphenation{legal}
    \hyphenation{worthy}

while tex does, on occasion, hyphenate words it
shouldn't, or put hyphens in the wrong places,
the words in the list shown are words that could
legitimately be hyphenated in u.s. english; a cursory
check of webster's collegiate dictionary (not the most
recent edition) shows hyphenation points at the same
places shown by a quick \showhyphens run.

even "really", which i see as the most questionable
of the list, has hyphenation points "re-al-ly" (the
second hyphen would be prevented by the setting of
\righthyphenmin=3).

your client can reset \lefthyphenmin=3 to avoid all
hyphens after fewer than three initial letters, but
for the rest of these words, the only solutions are
 - try the uk hyphenation patterns and settings,
   which are different from the u.s. ones;
 - use \hyphenation{...} as s/he has done.
							-- bb



More information about the texhax mailing list