[Tex/LaTex] Breaking words at the end of line

Question

LaTeX tends to break words at the end of the line when that causes better typography. Great. I'd like to have some sort of influence on where the words are broken, though.

For example, LaTeX currently breaks cryptography into cryptog-raphy when it does not fit, while I would much rather break it into crypto-graphy.

I've tried putting an mbox around it (or around both parts of the word) but that just ends up overflowing the hspace.

Is there a way I can put a box around the word but still allow a break at designated points, i.e. after crypto and before graphy? I'm fine with doing this on a per-word basis manually.

Answer 1

Various possibilities:

• use the right kind of hyphenation rules, e.g., in your case it is possibly \usepackage[british]{babel} instead of the default hyphenation patterns
• use \- inside a word to explicitly denote the allowed places to break, e.g. cryp\-to\-graphy
• specify exceptions via \hyphenation{cryp-to-graphy}