[Tex/LaTex] Line break of long author name

biblatexcitinghyphenationline-breaking

I have implemented the Harvard citation style using Biblatex and Biber as described here. This seems to work fine. However, I have now a problem with the line break of long author names, as shown in the figure below:

Line break for long author name not working

A similar problem has been described with long URLs here, whereby this problem could have been solved by increasing a certain penalty value.

Consequently, I tried to increase the following penalties as well without success:

  • highnamepenalty
  • lownamepenalty

Note that that this problem does not occur when I have no tilde (~) in front of the citep-command. However, this is not really a good workaround from my point of view.

A minimal working example can be found below

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{bachelorarbeit_lit.bib}
@article{Fillingham1997,
    author = {Fillingham, David},
    journal = {MIT},
    title = {{A Comparison of Digital and Handwritten Signatures}},
    url = {http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall97-papers/fillingham-sig.html},
    year = {1997}
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass[11pt]{scrreprt}

\usepackage[
    style=authoryear,
    natbib=true,
    backend=biber
]{biblatex}

\usepackage[british]{babel}

\setlength\parindent{0pt}

\addbibresource{bachelorarbeit_lit.bib}

\begin{document}
Since the fourth century \textit{signatures} are omnipresent in our everyday and business life~\citep{Fillingham1997}. They are broadly used to authenticate the identity of a person as well as to act as a sign of agreement toward third parties.
\end{document}

Best Answer

I believe you have two options to avoid the overfull line.

  1. Don't make the space before \citep{Fillingham1997} unbreakable, i.e., replace ~ with a plain space, . This will result in the complete string "(Fillingham, 1997)" showing up at the start of the following line.

    Making the space immediately before the citation callout unbreakable is useful if a numerical citation style is employed. In contrast, I do not think the practice is useful if authoryear-style citation callouts are used.

  2. Add the instruction

    \hyphenation{Fill-ing-ham}

    to the preamble, after loading babel. Doing so will let LaTeX hyphenate the word after Fill as well as between Filling and ham. (The US-English hyphenation patterns allow "Fill-ing-ham", whereas the UK-English patterns only allow "Filling-ham".)

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