[texhax] Hyphenation in tabular environments

Paul Cook pcook at caltech.edu
Fri Nov 16 09:52:37 CET 2007


Hi all,

I can't seem to find a solution for my problem, after a fair amount of 
searching around:

I'm trying to get reasonable (if not necessarily perfect) hyphenation in 
tabular environments in LaTeX2e. Currently, for long words in thin 
columns, I only get hyphenation if I explicitly indicate hyphenation 
locations with \-

As a sample:
-----------------------------
\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\tolerance=10000 % Has no effect
\setlength{\parskip}{2em} %For readability of example
\begin{tabular}{|p{48pt}|p{48pt}|p{48pt}|}
   Nevertheless &  Nevertheless &  Nevertheless
\end{tabular}

Nevertheless Nevertheless Nevertheless Nevertheless Nevertheless 
Nevertheless Nevertheless

  \begin{tabular}{|p{48pt}|p{48pt}|p{48pt}|}
   Neverthe\-less &  Nevertheless &  Nevertheless
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
------------------------------

The first tabular has no hyphenation, and all the "Nevertheless"'s are 
overfull boxes on one line. However, the hyphenation rules are correct 
in general, as they are used by LaTeX in the paragraph after the first 
tabular. And indeed, when I many put \- in place, as in the second 
tabular, LaTeX does use the hyphenation point to split the word over two 
lines.

So my question is: how do I get LaTeX to use the "normal" hyphenation 
rules? It tried the line "\tolerance=10000" above, in various ways, but 
it has no effect. I may well be using it incorrectly.

Any suggestions greatly welcome! Also, I don't mind somewhat overfull 
boxes, but I'd like some way to get LaTeX to at least TRY.

Thanks,
Paul Cook


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