How can I make a pair of words stick together in line breaks?

Question

How can I make a pair of words stick together in line breaks? For example, "MS Access". I don't want a line break in the middle. But, I'd like to set this up once, not at every occurrence of that word pair.

edit: Check out Sveinung's answer for two possible problems - overfull line, and hyphenation. For sure, I don't want that.

Answer 1

The correct answer may be that you put the two word in an \mbox{keep together}. Then you also avoid hyphenation (but not overfull lines).

The flip side of defining such words as macro, is that macros eat spaces. Therefore, you have to write the command \MSaccess{} in you text. Instead you may use the package xspace, and define the command:

\newcommand{\MSaccess}{\textsc{ms~access}\xspace}

Unfortunately, there is situations where xspace does not work, and may be it is better to define the command using def:

\def\MSA/{\mbox{\textsc{ms~access}}}

Now you can write \MSA/ (notice the slash), and LaTeXwill not eat the space. If you use small caps, be sure that the font you use has real small caps, and of course, small caps has to be letterspaced (see Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style).

I agree with Anon in his answer. Typographically it is better to have a line break between MS and Access than have a sloppy paragraph or an overfull line (a line sticking out in the right margin), or even worse

that `Ac-
cess` is hyphenated.

I suggest that you write your article, and when your are finished, as the last thing you do when proof reading, is to check if you have some places where you have a line break between MS and Access and then put the words in an \mbox{MS Access}.

This MWE demonstrates some of the differencies:

\documentclass[onepage]{article}
\usepackage{lmodern,xspace}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenx}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}


\newcommand{\MSaccess}{\textsc{MS}~Access} % NB! \textsc has no effect
\newcommand{\MSaccessx}{\textsc{MS}~Access\xspace}
\def\MSA/{\mbox{\textsc{ms~access}}}

\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}

Here is a text which only purpose is to demostrate that
\MSaccess without \emph{xspace} eats spaces.


Here is the text which only purpose is to demostrate the wonders 
\emph{xspace} do for \MSaccessx with \emph{xspace} eats spaces. But look here 
«\MSaccessx», and how we get a space before the nice, French sitation mark (NB! 
\emph{xspace} may be configured to avoid this).

And here is the eminent `def`-macro that does not eat any spaces, as I state,
\MSA/ is OK, and does not fail because of strange punctuation, «\MSA/».

\end{document}

Answer 2

I don't know if there's a built-in mechanism like \hyphenation for this, but you could simply define own commands for such word groups, for example

\newcommand{\MSaccess}{MS~Access}

which you then can use in the text.

Usage:

Some random text \MSaccess{}, some more text...

should output

Some random text MS Access, some more text

where there is no line break allowed between MS and Access.

As user Sveinung pointed out in the comments, the above command will still allow hyphenation of the involved words, i.e. MS<linebreak>Access would be forbidden, but LaTeX could possibly hyphenate it toMS Ac-<linebreak>cess. This may be OK in some cases, especially when the words that should be kept together are rather long. If also hyphenation shall not be allowed, one can change the command from above to

\newcommand{\MSaccess}{\mbox{MS Access}}

which will then also prevent hyphenation.

Answer 3

You do not need to define any macro.

Simply learn to type MS~Access. The tilde is TeX's syntax for preventing a break. (IIRC, how it works is that it creates a very high penalty for a break at that spot.)

The macro business in the other answers is a red herring. The tilde does the work, whether in a macro expansion or not.