[Tex/LaTex] Avoid Single Letters at the End of Lines [Polish Language Rule]

typography

I'm writing the thesis in Polish language and one of our typography rule is that there can't be single letter at the and of line, like (w and i):

Tomek poszedl do sklepu w % <-- not allowed
mieście, żeby kupić jabłka i % <-- not allowed
bułki

I'm using LaTeX and the solution proposed by @topskip in this post:

one-letter word at the end of line

produce multiple errors during compliation. Additionaly, this content was posted few yeras ago. So I'm wondering is there any new tip that can solve my problem?

Best Answer

You are using LaTeX (i guess pdflatex) and not LuaTeX which was used in the referred solution. Am I right?

Before You Start Your Thesis / Document

Following the LaTeX wikibook (link) about the internationalization in the case of Polish:

Polish has many single letter connectives [...] To ensure that LaTeX won't set them as last letter in the line, you have to use non breakable space [...]

i~słodka
a~także
i~ciała
i~Basi

So the solution is to simply connect the following word with a ~ (tilde, also known as a non breakable space).

The non breakable space feature of the tilde character is a core LaTeX feature (thanks at @DavidCarlisle).

By the way, I googled for polish single letter latex and the solution was the third entry in my hit list.

When You Have Already Finished Your Document

Maybe you can use a text editor like Notepad++ (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) and search and replace _z_, and _w_ and so on with _z~, and _w~ and so on (with _ I want to indicate a space).

Notepad++ also can search and replace in multiple files at once. Be sure that you try it on a backup copy of your actual document!

With regular expressions you may be able to have even more sophisticated ways. But I do not know much about that.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Listings, Literate Programming, and Beautiful Typography

When typesetting C code in non-monospaced fonts, I've certainly found the "literate programming" options useful.

What I've used them for is specifying typography for symbol pairs that aren't very readable in the standard non-monospaced font -- not replacing them with a different symbol, but adjusting to make the same symbols more readable. For instance, "--" doesn't look right in Times, so I've used literate={--}{{\texttt{--}} to make that look better.

Meanwhile, when one's using illustrative pseudocode in discussions of algorithms that are detached from details of programming language syntax, I do think it's useful to use non-programming symbols. For one thing, it helps make it clear that what you are writing is not compilable C code -- even if it has a C-like syntax, and is really just C with irrelevant bits removed. (Or Lisp, or whatever.) And, since the "irrelevant bits" are going to vary from discussion to discussion, I haven't found that one specific pseudocode format applies to everything.

[Tex/LaTex] Spacing of sectioning commands for grid typesetting

As you have noted, ex (and em) lengths are relative to the currently used fonts. The reason for this depends on the application. In your instance it makes sense using a font size-specific length, since the typesetting the sectional heading may be different depending on whether the document is processed using 10pt, 11pt or 12pt (or, for that matter, any other font size) as \normalfont. For example, using absolute lengths (like pt, bp or pc, for example) may cause the gap between section headings and text to seem too small, or too large, if the font size is changed. The example below a font-based skip of 1em between a pseudo-section heading is replaced by a fixed-width 11.5pt skip (in 10pt, 1em or roughly 11.5pt, see the TeX Book, p 60):

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\bfseries% For bold font

{\normalfont Font-based skip of \verb!1em!} \par \medskip

\newcommand{\myskip}{\unskip\rule[0.5ex]{1em}{1pt}\ignorespaces}
{\normalsize 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\large 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\Large 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\LARGE 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\Huge 1 \myskip A section \par}%

\bigskip \hrulefill \bigskip

{\normalfont Fixed-width skip of \verb!11.5pt!} \par \medskip

\renewcommand{\myskip}{\unskip\rule[0.5ex]{11.5pt}{1pt}\ignorespaces}
{\normalsize 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\large 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\Large 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\LARGE 1 \myskip A section \par}%
{\Huge 1 \myskip A section \par}%
\end{document}

Since I am not entirely sure of your sectional intent (that almost came out wrong), here's a suggestion when it comes to page-breaking woes. The needspace package provides \needspace{<len>} that issues a \break if there is less than <len> space available on the page. And, the code is not very complicated. Here is a modified version, now taking 3 arguments for the sake of this discussion:

\makeatletter
% \needspace{<len>}{<NOT enough space>}{<enough space>}
\newcommand{\needspace}[3]{\par \penalty-100\begingroup
  \setlength{\dimen@}{#1}%
  \dimen@ii\pagegoal \advance\dimen@ii-\pagetotal
  \ifdim \dimen@>\dimen@ii% execute the following if there IS NOT enough space on page
    \ifdim \dimen@ii>\z@
      \vfil
    \fi
    \break
    #2% <NOT enough space>
  \else% execute the following if there IS enough space on page
    #3% <enough space>
  \fi\endgroup}
\makeatother

It would be possible to redefine \section so as to use the above \needspace and condition on the type of \@startsection that should be called.