Forcing linebreaks in \url

Question

I wish to typeset some relatively long URLs in a piece of text, and when I use \url{..}, the resulting text does not respect the margin boundaries that govern the main text body, instead going all the way to the edge of the paper before wrapping around.

For reference, my preamble looks like this:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{mathptmx}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\usepackage[pdftex]{hyperref}

and example of the url I'm including is:

\begin{itemize}
\item Some text

\url{very-long-url}
...
\end{itemize}

I'm compiling using pdflatex, although I doubt this makes a difference.

Answer 1

(converting a previous comment to an answer)

A quick google search (alas, too quick) reveals one solution. Use the [hyphens] option with the url package. Some recommendations also include inserting \sloppy in case latex is trying too hard to align things.

Answer 2

I carefully read the documentation of the \url package (I'm using PDFLatex) and found the following to work quite nice to let LaTeX add line breaks after every normal alphabetic character:

\renewcommand{\UrlBreaks}{\do\/\do\a\do\b\do\c\do\d\do\e\do\f\do\g\do\h\do\i\do\j\do\k\do\l\do\m\do\n\do\o\do\p\do\q\do\r\do\s\do\t\do\u\do\v\do\w\do\x\do\y\do\z\do\A\do\B\do\C\do\D\do\E\do\F\do\G\do\H\do\I\do\J\do\K\do\L\do\M\do\N\do\O\do\P\do\Q\do\R\do\S\do\T\do\U\do\V\do\W\do\X\do\Y\do\Z}

---

Edit by Speravir after incomplete change of above example by an unregistered user:

To save function of the original \UrlBreaks do the following instead:

\let\origUrlBreaks\UrlBreaks
\renewcommand*{\UrlBreaks}{\origUrlBreaks\do\a\do\b\do\c\do\d\do\e\do\f\do\g\do\h\do\i\do\j\do\k\do\l\do\m\do\n\do\o\do\p\do\q\do\r\do\s\do\t\do\u\do\v\do\w\do\x\do\y\do\z\do\A\do\B\do\C\do\D\do\E\do\F\do\G\do\H\do\I\do\J\do\K\do\L\do\M\do\N\do\O\do\P\do\Q\do\R\do\S\do\T\do\U\do\V\do\W\do\X\do\Y\do\Z}

But be warned: It’s not a nice solution. Herbert’s answer is much better.

Answer 3

The package defines \def\UrlOrds{\do\*\do\-\do\~\do\'\do\"\do\-}% which can be added to the default url break characters at which a line can be broken:

\documentclass{article}
\textwidth=8cm
\parindent=0pt

\usepackage{url}
\makeatletter
\g@addto@macro{\UrlBreaks}{\UrlOrds}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\rule{\linewidth}{1pt}

foo bar baz \url{very-long-url-very-long-url-very-long-url-very-long-url-very-long-url-}

\end{document}

Answer 4

If it's not necessary for the url to appear verbatim, you could use \href{url}{text}. That way you could give the url a human-readable form. If your document is used electronically you just use it as an hyperlink and if the document is printed you could (or should) question the relevance of long (and probably cryptic) url's.

Answer 5

Using the sloppypar environment as in

\begin{sloppypar}
  Figure \ref{fig:example_instant_lumi}:
  Public result available from \url{https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic/LuminosityPublicResults}, version of 16.12.2011.
\end{sloppypar}

helps in my case. Without sloppypar the AtlasPublic part runs over the right margin, with sloppypar LaTeX breaks after view/ and everything's fine. (Doesn't need the url package.)

Answer 6

You may also want to look at the breakurl package.

Answer 7

I have a similar problem with itemize environment. When a word (or an url) is too long to respect the margin it does not starts a newline. Using \sloppy works but is very ugly.

My LaTeX code is generated by rst2latex.py and I use pdflatex on it.

I found that much better solution on the latex-community.org forum :

\tolerance 1414
\hbadness 1414
\emergencystretch 1.5em
\hfuzz 0.3pt
\widowpenalty=10000
\vfuzz \hfuzz
\raggedbottom

So I add this snippet in my docutils.tex and everything is just fine !