[texhax] hyphenation ...

[Ian.Collier at comlab.ox.ac.uk]

Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk writes:
>http://www.google.com/groups?q=%5Cpretolerance+hyphenation+group:comp.text.tex&hl=en&lr=&selm=17SEP199618292218%40reg.triumf.ca&rnum=1
>
>there donald arseneau highlights the words ("essentially always") in
>the texbook that were niggling at me when i was trying to recall the
>problem with this use of \pretolerance.
>
>that post has a paragraph with \pretolerance=10000 and lots of nice
>hyphenation.

That's interesting, thanks.  It turns out that the two flaws with this
approach are: (a) it doesn't use \emergencystretch, and (b) if a line
is totally impossible (i.e., too long) to set without hyhpenation then
it will go ahead and hyphenate it anyway (together with the rest of the
paragraph).

So the solution should be:
 \hyphenpenalty=10000      %% or any of the other ways
 \exhyphenpenalty=10000    %% to turn hyphenation off
 \pretolerance=9999
 \tolerance=\pretolerance
 \emergencystretch=10pt    % it may be necessary to experiment with this value.

The OP in this thread wasn't told to use \emergencystretch, and it isn't
in the FAQ either.  It's what helps TeX to stop setting overfull lines
without using the rather wild spacing that can sometimes happen with
\pretolerance=10000.
-- 
---- Ian Collier : imc at comlab.ox.ac.uk : WWW page below
------ http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ian.collier/imc.shtml