Text Formatting ⇒ Help with \hyphenation{}

[hekoushui]

I created a new word: "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa". That's 80 'a's.

In the preamble I have

Code: Select all

\hyphenation{aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa}

--that is, I specified a hyphen after the 40th 'a'.

In the body I have nothing but my new word. No hyphen is inserted; instead I get one line and a bad box. Why?

Same problem occurs if I comment out the \hyphenation{} part and instead use a '\-' directly after the 40th 'a'.

[localghost]

It could be helpful to know what you are after (DNA sequences?). At the moment I see no sense in what you are doing so I'm toiling with a solution.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[frabjous]

I suspect the problem has something to do with the fact that unless the text width were exactly right that 40 a's fit it perfectly, LaTeX wouldn't hyphenate it, because hyphenating it would just replace an overfull box with an underfull box.

I agree that it would be nice to know why you're doing this, and for what purpose. Without that, it's very difficult to suggest an alternative.

[hekoushui]

It could be helpful to know what you are after (DNA sequences?). At the moment I see no sense in what you are doing so I'm toiling with a solution.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

It's just a simple example I made up to test the function of \hyphenation{}. I don't understand why specifying a hyphen after the 40th 'a' doesn't lead to insertion of this hyphen and instead results in an overfull hbox.

[hekoushui]

I suspect the problem has something to do with the fact that unless the text width were exactly right that 40 a's fit it perfectly, LaTeX wouldn't hyphenate it, because hyphenating it would just replace an overfull box with an underfull box.

I agree that it would be nice to know why you're doing this, and for what purpose. Without that, it's very difficult to suggest an alternative.

Assuming hyphenation would result in an underfull box: shouldn't LaTeX err on the side of the underfull box in these kinds of situations? Because it doesn't, I have 40 extra characters on one line that are unreadable in the .dvi output.