[Tex/LaTex] How to manually set where a word is split

Question

In my article, words are sometimes split a bit weird. For example: although ev-erywhere isn't wrong, it doesn't read very easily, so I'd like to split it as every-where.

How can I do that? I tried typing every\-where (provided by the babel package), but that doesn't work.

Answer 1

The American English hyphenation patterns loaded by TeX/LaTeX (those by Liang and Knuth) allow hyphenating ev-ery-where. The British ones (by Wujastyk and Toal), only allow every-where. Curiously enough, the online Oxford dictionary for American English says eve-ry-where. Also, if we instead of the traditional patterns for AmEn we use the “US English max” patterns by Kuiken, the only allowed hyphenation is every-where.

Let's look for a confirmation with a test:

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand\test[1]{%
  \language\csname l@#1\endcsname
  \parbox[t]{0pt}{\hspace{0pt}everywhere}%
}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{lll}
American English  & American English    & British English     \\
(Liang-Knuth)     & (Kuiken)            & (Wujastik and Toal) \\
\test{english}    & \test{usenglishmax} & \test{british}
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

If you feel that ev-ery-where is ambiguous, you can add

\hyphenation{every-where}

to your preamble. If you do language shifting with babel, it's best to use its own method for defining hyphenation exceptions:

\babelhyphenation[english]{every-where}

(you need babel version 3.9). Changing the hyphenation patterns to use usenglishmax is possible with H. Oberdiek's package hyphsubst, typing

\usepackage[english=usenglishmax]{hyphsubst}

as soon as possible in the preamble.

However, TeX is usually quite frugal with hyphenation, provided the line length is generous. By loading microtype you can even decrease the hyphenation frequency.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}

\begin{document}

\microtypesetup{activate=false}
\kant[1]

\microtypesetup{activate=true}
\kant[1]

\end{document}