[vox-tech] breakinguplongwordsinlatex

[Shawn P. Neugebauer]

On Tuesday 23 April 2002 05:28 pm, you wrote:
> begin nbs <nbs@sonic.net>
> > On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 05:10:13PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > <snip>
> > > \linebreak[0]: if it's convenient, please consider line breaking here.
> > > \linebreak[1]: please line break here.
> > > \linebreak[2]: line break here.
> > > \linebreak[3]: you better line break here or there's hell to pay
> > > \linebreak[4]: hello latex, this is god speaking. thou shalt line
> > > break.
> >
> > Hmm.. this doesn't do much for me.  I'm not in control of the data
> > being sent.  (In this case, if the people making the data would need
> > to go through the trouble of inserting a "\linebreak" command, they
> > may as well just stick a space in there instead, since it will Do The
> > Right Thing, anyway.  -  I'm thinking this is what I'm going to have to
> > have them do.)
>
> ok, i think i understand a bit more.   can you make a parbox of a
> certain width?   i think sticking everything in the parbox should give
> you the desired result.

(fyi--would have been helpful to know up front that you didn't want
to modify the data).

the parbox trick, which is usually so useful in controlling tables, does
not work here.  it does not force a word to break, rather, it causes
an overfull \hbox situation.  try it out.

the problem is one of making a "word" break, without hyphenating it!
i think this is quite a challenge for latex.  i don't think you'll find an
"easy" way to do this.  you might try one of the verbatim-type
environments, or a typewriter-type environment, i'm not sure.

you might consider doing a little pre-processing of the data.  it
wouldn't be hard to write a little script in perl/shell/etc. to insert
spaces or otherwise format the data in a particular column.  it
sounds like you have a lot of data and you don't want to bug
your end-user.  a little utility code would be useful.

BOOKS:  i would add this one (i've mentioned it previously):
_Math_Into_Latex_ by Gratzer.  I consider essential for anyone
doing mathematically-oriented documents with latex.

shawn.