General ⇒ Error while using \linebreak inside a heading

[AleCes]

[…] This is no solution: if I remove \hbox{-}, and leave a simple hyphen in place, the date will be split and that is unintended.

What about either customizing the ToC itself or the page geometry?

What do you mean by "customizing the ToC itself"? Why can't we just get this line break working?

[localghost]

What do you mean by "customizing the ToC itself"? […]

E.g. influencing the width of entries for the headings and thus the line breaks. But using geometry for other (more appropriate) page dimensions would also be a good start.

[…] Why can't we just get this line break working?

Good question. At the moment I have no straightforward solution.

[AleCes]

I can use geometry, but the layout is fine for me, I don't want to change it, actually I don't understand why \\ works but \linebreak doesn't. If some package somehow doesn't like line breaks, \\ should give me an error as well, but it doesn't!

[cgnieder]

[...] I don't understand why \\ works but \linebreak doesn't. [..]

Because \linebreak is a fragile command which in a moving argument such as a heading must be protected with \protect while \\ is robust, i.e. it has been defined via \DeclareRobustCommand. This has nothing to do with any package.

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\newcommand*\cs[1]{\texttt{\textbackslash#1}}
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents

% error:
% \section{A heading\linebreak with a \cs{linebreak}}

% works:
\section{A heading \protect\linebreak with a \cs{linebreak}}

% works:
\section{A heading \\ with \cs{\textbackslash}}
\end{document}

Regards

[AleCes]

Thanks, cgnieder, it works!