Text Formatting ⇒ Breaking a long word without hyphenation - how?

[liebichw]

Hi,
I'm writing on a rather long program documentation, for a JAVA program.
This document contains some pretty long words - for example fully qualified class names (including package names).
These words have non alphanumeric characters in them (like '.' or '_') and are not hyphenated.
They often lead to "overfull hbox" warnings, and I want a method of "silent hyphenation" for them - allow them to be broken (maybe even at defineable "break points") BUT no hyphenation character must be shown (because this could confuse the reader into believing the hyphen char to be part of the word itself).
IOW I want something similar to the way the URL package is (reputedly) handling long strings.
There IS some way of "silent hyphenation" IIRC --- but I can't find where I read about it
Can anyone here help me out?
TIA,
Wolfgang Liebich

[localghost]

Have a look at the listings package for writing code in a certain programming language. It has predefined languages and JAVA is one of them.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten¹

[liebichw]

Thanks, I will look into the package.
But I don't really want to type set listings --- my book is ordinary text, with some really long words interspersed which should not get hyphenated -- but just word breaking them would be OK (like fully qualified java class names, or config entry names --- which can be very long due to obscure reasons).

[localghost]

The package is not only for long listings, but also provides the \lstinline|…| command which may support line breaks.

[liebichw]

Thanks for the tip --- but according to some forum posts I've googled now, \lstline does not support breaking a word :-/
I seem to remember a variant of \- where there's no hyphen shown, but just a word break - unfortunately I cannot remember WHERE I read that
Does anyone besides me remember reading something like that?
- Ciao, Wolfgang

[mas]

I tried \def\-{\discretionary{}{}{}} and it worked.

Regards.

[logger]

What does this \descretionary command do? I'm having a hard time finding any explanation. I think I'm in the same boat as the OP. I'm documenting an ASIC verification environment. I need to break a long line that looks like:

env.soc_top.soc_core.blk_a.foo_blk.bar_blk

I'd like latex to break on a period, without a hyphen. So that could become:

env.soc_top.soc_core.blk_a.
foo_blk.bar_blk

Other than this change, I'd like normal hyphenation rules to remain the same.

I added \def\-{\discretionary{}{}{}} to my file and it didn't change a thing.

Regards.

[gmedina]

Hi,

What does this \descretionary command do? I'm having a hard time finding any explanation. I think I'm in the same boat as the OP...

Please refer to section 19.3 Discretionaries (pp. 163ff.) of the book TeX by Topic by Victor Eijkhout.

[logger]

gmedina, thanks for that pointer. That is a very good resource!

I first tried:

\def\.{\discretionary{.}{}{.}}

env\.soc_top\.soc_core\.blk_a\.foo_blk\.bar_blk

But I found that some other macros seem to reset \.

So I switched to:

\def\/{\discretionary{.}{}{.}}

env\/soc_top\/soc_core\/blk_a\/foo_blk\/bar_blk

That works, and doesn't get reset.

The results are acceptable, but not optimal. I am getting "Overfull \hbox (38.73192pt too wide) in paragraph ..." messages. It will break a line like:

env.soc_top.soc_core.blk_a.foo_blk.
bar_blk

But "foo_blk." is still overflowing into the margin. It should have produced:

env.soc_top.soc_core.blk_a.
foo_blk.bar_blk

Any suggestions on how to improve this?

Regards.

[ulmoo]

It's kind of a hack, but you can use:

Code: Select all

Gutenacht\nolinebreak[0]geschichte

It's basically a request not to break the line at that point, but with a low priority (scale is from 0 to 4, with 4 as the highest priority). The result is that LaTeX usually won't break the line at that point, but it will break it if it's really necessary - without a hyphen.