[Tex/LaTex] Hyphenation in Beamer Presentations

Question

I am using beamer in LaTeX to create a presentation. But it seems hyphenation is disabled.
At least for the items inside itemize environments and text inside the blocks I don't see any hyphenation while by eye inspection I expect LaTeX to do automatic hyphenation and produce nicer paragraphs.

Is there any specific command so that I can force LaTeX to run automatic hyphenation?

Answer 1

In some languages you will have really long words. So reducing the number of words as suggested in some comments is simply not possible. You can set a parbox around your text to get hyphenation working. e.g.:

\parbox{\linewidth}{text with possible long words to hyphenate}

Here is a fully working example using \hy{text} as a helper for reusing command several times:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel} % example language with long words                                                                                                                                                                                
\def\hy#1{\parbox{\linewidth}{#1}} % helper for using command several times                                                                                                                                                                   
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  \hy{Die Speicherverwaltungsadressen der heutigen
  Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften eines
  Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftsmitarbeiters haben
  siebentausendzweihundertvierundachtzig Zeilen.}
  \bigskip
  \begin{itemize}
    \item \hy{Speicherverwaltungsadressen Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften}
  \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Results with and without parbox:

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