[Tex/LaTex] Why is Latex hyphenating some words automatically, but others dont

babelbadnessdebugginghyphenation

On this example, the word usando is not being hyphenated, but the word Comandos is. If I force a hyphen on the first word usan-do, it is hyphenated correctly:

\documentclass[10pt,openright,twoside,a5paper]{memoir}
\usepackage[brazil]{babel}

\usepackage[showframe]{geometry}
\setlength{\parindent}{1.6cm}

\begin{document}

\frenchspacing
\selectlanguage{brazil}
No entanto, você pode compilar os documentos \LaTeX usando os seguintes
comandos, que devem ser digitados no \emph{Prompt de Comandos} do Windows ou no
\emph{Terminal} do Mac ou do Linux:

\end{document}

test2.tex:11: Overfull \hbox (4.94724pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 11--14[]\OT1/cmr/m/n/10 No en-tanto, voc pode com-pi-lar os do-cu-men-tos L[]T[]Xusando

Is there some way to debug the LaTeX hyphenation? For example, I can debug the overfull boxes, using \usepackage[showframe]{geometry} or \usepackage{showframe} in my preamble. So, is there some package I can include which helps me to find out why LaTeX is not hyphenating some words?

Best Answer

At first the word \LaTeX right before usando is confusing the hyphenation. But most importantly: \righthyphenmin is 3 in this language, that means that LaTeX will never break 2 chars at the end. You can change this:

\documentclass[10pt,openright,twoside,a5paper]{memoir}
\usepackage[brazil]{babel}

\usepackage[showframe]{geometry}
\setlength{\parindent}{1.6cm}

\renewcommand\brazilhyphenmins{22} %left=2, right=2

\begin{document}

\frenchspacing
\selectlanguage{brazil}
No entanto, você pode compilar os documentos \LaTeX{} usando os seguintes
comandos, que devem ser digitados no \emph{Prompt de Comandos} do Windows ou no
\emph{Terminal} do Mac ou do Linux:

\end{document}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to prevent LaTeX from hyphenating the entire document

This is discussed in detail in the TeX FAQ. Summarising the information given there:

You can set \hyphenpenalty and \exhyphenpenalty to 10000, which will stop hyphenation, but as TeX will still try to hyphenate this is not hugely efficient.
As Joel says, you can use \usepackage[none]{hyphenat} to select a 'language' with no hyphenation at all. This works fine for a single language document, but not if you want to use babel or polyglossia for other language-specific effects.
Setting \righthyphenmin and \lefthyphenmin to very large values will prevent hyphenation as it tells TeX that it must have more characters in the word than are going to be available. The suggested value in the FAQ is 62.
You can set \hyphenchar\font=-1, which will prevent hyphenation for the current font: this is probably not the best way for an entire document but is how it is done for the tt font shape in LaTeX.

Now, of those (2) is probably the best choice. However, what you did not say is why you want no hyphenation. TeX hyphenates when it cannot find a good line break without it, so you get few hyphens in most cases. The risk with no hyphenation at all is that the output looks bad.

[Tex/LaTex] Hyphenat not hyphenating words with hyphens

TeX doesn't apply hyphenation rules to words that explicitly contain a hyphen.

The \hyp command essentially produces a hyphen that's followed by a glob of glue, making it possible to apply hyphenation rules on the next word part.

_{Technical note. A word, in this context, is a run of characters having nonzero \lccode, starting from a glob of glue and ending at anything that doesn't fit the criterion.}

Why isn't Sughra hyphenated in al\hyp{}Sughra? Because the default language is English, which has \righthyphenmin (minimum number of characters following an implicit hyphen) set to 3.

You might set \righthyphenmin to 2, but this will most likely produce wrong hyphenation of English words.

You can typeset your document and add, where necessary, \- in the needed places. Chances are you won't need to add many of these tokens. Otherwise, do

\newcommand{\alsughra}{Al-Sugh\-ra}

and use \alsughra{} in your document.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to prevent LaTeX from hyphenating the entire document

[Tex/LaTex] Hyphenat not hyphenating words with hyphens

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