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2.14 Hyphenation

Words sometimes require hyphenation to help justify paragraphs and prevent overly large areas of white space or protrusions into the right margin. Some word processors by default don't hyphenate words in fully-justified paragraphs, which has led some people to believe that hyphenation is bad. Just because word processors do something a certain way, doesn't mean that it's the correct way. TeX has an excellent hyphenation algorithm, but the default hyphenation pattern is designed for English. If you are writing in another language, use the babel package to switch the hyphenation pattern (see §5.8. Multi-Lingual Support: using the babel package).

Despite using an excellent algorithm, TeX occasionally gets the hyphenation wrong, particularly where the hyphenation is context sensitive. There are two ways of setting the hyphenation for a given word.

  1. For all occurrences of the word, use

    \hyphenation{<hyphenated word>}

    inserting a hyphen - at all possible hyphenation points. For example:

  2. For a particular instance of a word, use \- at the hyphenation point within the word. For example:

    There once was a little alien called Uiop who lived in the faraway gal\-axy of Zxcv.


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