Here, each of the... man\-u\-script ...
\
-
commands is converted to a hyphenated break,
if (and only if) necessary.
That technique can rapidly become tedious: you’ll probably only accept
it if there are no more than one or two wrongly-hyphenated words in
your document. The alternative is to set up hyphenations in the
document preamble. To do that, for the hyphenation above, you would
write:
and the hyphenation would be set for the whole document. Barbara Beeton publishes articles containing lists of these “hyphenation exceptions”, in TUGboat; the hyphenation ‘man-u-script’ comes from one of those articles. What if you have more than one language in your document? Simple: select the appropriate language, and do the same as above:\hyphenation{man-u-script}
(nothing clever here: this is the “correct” hyphenation of the word, in the current tables). However, there’s a problem here: just as words with accent macros in them won’t break, so an\usepackage[french]{babel} \selectlanguage{french} \hyphenation{re-cher-cher}
\
hyphenation
commands with accent macros in its argument will produce an error:
tells us that the hyphenation is “improper”, and that it will be “flushed”. But, just as hyphenation of words is enabled by selecting an 8-bit font encoding, so\usepackage[french]{babel} \selectlanguage{french} \hyphenation{r\'e-f\'e-rence}
\
hyphenation
commands are rendered proper again
by selecting that same 8-bit font encoding. For the hyphenation
patterns provided for ‘legacy’, the encoding is
Cork, so the complete sequence is:
The same sort of performance goes for any language for which 8-bit fonts and corresponding hyphenation patterns are available. Since you have to select both the language and the font encoding to have your document typeset correctly, it should not be a great imposition to do the selections before setting up hyphenation exceptions. Modern TeX variants (principally XeTeX and LuaTeX) use unicode, internally, and distributions that offer them also offer UTF-8-encoded patterns; since the hyphenation team do all the work “behind the scenes”, the use of Unicode hyphenation is deceptively similar to what we are used to.\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[french]{babel} \selectlanguage{french} \hyphenation{r\'e-f\'e-rence}
This answer last edited: 2013-09-20
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=hyphexcept