best practicescodehyphenation
What is the best practice for hyphenating long identifiers like Character.isJavaIdentifierStart when they appear in body text? I am aware of the path package that also deals with otherwise active characters.
On occasion I have locally defined
\def\+{\discretionary{}{}{}}
which introduces a hyphenation point at \+ but no hyphen in order to avoid the confusion whether the hyphen belongs to the identifier or not.
Something at the back of my mind told me Barbara had a similar list, google helped out with some links here
Why something isn't available as a default is a difficult question to answer. In this particular case, who wants to mark up a document source always with such long commands? If fear only a few people so that such commands would end up not being very useful as such.
However, LaTeX offers something like this as part of the Babel interface for languages and there in a manner that makes input fairly painless: all languages that support " as a babel shorthand have abbreviations like "= (compound word mark allowing hyphenation in the remainder) and a bunch of others like "" and "- and "~ defining various alternative behaviors for explicit or implict hyphens.
However, none of them is really what you are looking for, the reason being that in languages like German the compound word mark is really a preferable break point (not a forbidden one).
Also those shorthands are only set up for some languages typically those that needed input methods for diacritical character. So, for example, for English nothing is being set up by default. But you can always define your own shorthands, so to achieve what you are looking for with a (imho) useful input syntax you could do
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\useshorthands{"}
\defineshorthand{"=}{\mbox{-}\nobreak\hspace{0pt}}
\begin{document}
\fbox{\parbox{22mm}{Gutenberg-Universit\"at}}
\fbox{\parbox{22mm}{Gutenberg"=Universit\"at}}
\end{document}
which gives you
Best Answer
I am not too sure if there is a
bestpractice, but here are two approaches.The first method uses the
urlcommand to automatically hyphenate at certain points such as for example dots. The second one uses a discretionary (with or without a hyphen). Whatever you choose, I am sure that you will need to give TeX a helping hand, that is you cannot avoid doing some manual editing in the end.In the example I colored the word and used a libertine family font.