How to get long \texttt sections to break

Question

I often format path names with \texttt which can be very long. Usually Tex will not break this text. The line will just create a hbox overflow. It looks like this:

................
...C:\documents and settings
................
................
................
................
................
................
................

How do I get Tex to create a line break?

Answer 1

Load the url package and use its \path{...} command:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{url}
\begin{document}
Here is a long path: \path{/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty}
\end{document}

Answer 2

Hyphenation and full justification is possible with typewriter text as well. Here's a command \justify for this purpose, shown with the example above:

\documentclass{minimal}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\newcommand*\justify{%
  \fontdimen2\font=0.4em% interword space
  \fontdimen3\font=0.2em% interword stretch
  \fontdimen4\font=0.1em% interword shrink
  \fontdimen7\font=0.1em% extra space
  \hyphenchar\font=`\-% allowing hyphenation
}

\begin{document}
\texttt{\justify\lipsum[1]}
\end{document}

Further the everysel package might be useful, as shown in Full justification with typewriter font.

Answer 3

Actually, \texttt does break the text flow, as evidenced from the following test:

\documentclass{minimal}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
  \lipsum[1]
  \texttt{\lipsum[1]}
\end{document}

The problem is that \texttt doesn’t break the text correctly, because apparently it computes the line width incorrectly.

The easiest solution is to introduce soft hyphens at appropriate places:

\texttt{C:\doc\-uments and set\-tings}

This will use the hyphens as hints for possible word separators, and hyphenate the words accordingly. If that doesn’t help, a manual line break helps.

Though quite unsatisfactory, another advice is actually to reformulate the offending sentence so that it flows more nicely.