In a LaTeX document I'm writing, I get an overfull hbox warning because of the word "multi-disciplinary", which happens to be rendered at the end of a line.
I can get rid of this particular warning by changing it into multi-discipli\-nary
, but the same problem will happen elsewhere, since this word is used a lot in the paper.
I'd like to use the \hyphenation{}
command instead, but obviously my tentative \hyphenation{multi-disci-pli-na-ry}
does not work, because it does not understand the first dash correctly.
What incantation do I need to get correct indentation in a word that already contains a dash?
Bonus question: Where could I have found the answer to that question myself?
The problem (as KennyTM noted) is that LaTeX won't hyphenate words with dashes in them. Luckily, there's a standard package (part of ncctools) that addresses that very problem, called extdash
. This defines new hyphen and dash commands that do not disrupt hyphenation, and which can allow or prevent line breaks at the hyphen/dash. I prefer to use it with the shortcuts
option, so I can use, e.g., \-/
rather than \Hyphdash
. Here's what you want:
\usepackage[shortcuts]{extdash}
...
multi\-/disciplinary
To prevent breaking at that hyphen, use multi\=/disciplinary
(Aside: The Chicago Manual of Style advises dropping the hyphens attaching affixes like 'multi', unless the word is ambiguous or unintelligible without it.)