squeeze the text in table

Question

I had gone thro this question and still in my case, i have the overlapping text in the table

Here is my MWE

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{book}
\usepackage{pdflscape}    % to change certain pages to landscape mode
\usepackage{longtable}  % for tables spanning multiple pages
\begin{document}

This is my example


\begin{landscape}
 \begin{tabular}{|p{5cm}|p{2cm}|p{2cm}|p{2cm}|p{2cm}|p{2cm}|p{2cm}|}
\hline 
ABCD EFGH  ABCD EFGH  ABCD EFGH ABCD EFGH  ABCD EFGH  & H & H & H & H & OCH2-CH=C(CH3)CH2CH2CH=C(CH3)2 & H  \tabularnewline
\hline 
\end{tabular}
\newline
\end{landscape}
\end{document}

I can not expand / compress the column size.

The question is how to fix the overflowing text in 6th column. Whereas column 1 fits properly.

Should i manually hyphenate the text to fit into the desired cell width?

Answer 1

This version switches category codes, so can not be used in the argument to another command, but works OK here I think. The penalty0 allows breaks at those points, if some are more desirable than others you could give the desirable ones negative penalties and the undesirable ones positive penalties.

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{book}
\usepackage{pdflscape}    % to change certain pages to landscape mode
\usepackage{longtable}  % for tables spanning multiple pages
\usepackage{array}
\newcolumntype{P}[1]{>{\raggedright\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}\mybreaks}p{#1}}

\begingroup
\catcode`=\active
\catcode`-\active
\catcode`)\active
\gdef\mybreaks{%
\catcode`=\active\edef={\string=\penalty0 }%
\catcode`)\active\edef){\string)\penalty0 }%
\catcode`-\active\edef-{\string-\penalty0 }}
\endgroup
\begin{document}

This is my example


\begin{landscape}
 \begin{tabular}{|P{5cm}|P{2cm}|P{2cm}|P{2cm}|P{2cm}|P{2cm}|P{2cm}|}
\hline 
ABCD EFGH  ABCD EFGH  ABCD EFGH ABCD EFGH  ABCD EFGH  & H & H & H & H & OCH2-CH=C(CH3)CH2CH2CH=C(CH3)2 & H  \tabularnewline
\hline 
\end{tabular}
\newline
\end{landscape}
\end{document}