First word hyphenation in parbox with strut

Question

I've a problem with parbox spacing in combination with hyphenation. What I like to achieve is setting parboxes in a tabular-like way as key value pairs. So I have two parboxes with a given width per line. The first problem was the hyphenation of the first word in parbox, that was solved by using \hspace{0pt}. Now, when I have multiple lines, each with a key and a value parbox, there's no vertical spacing between.

So I tried to overcome this by using a \strut. Now, I have the vertical spacing, but the hyphenation of the first word does no longer work.

Please see the following minimal working example:

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}

\newcommand{\myKey}{MyLongKeyLabel}
\newcommand{\myValue}{ThisIsMyLongValue}

\newcommand{\myKeyValuePair}{%
    \parbox[t]{20mm}{\raggedright%
        \hspace{0pt}\myKey%\strut%
    }%
    \hspace{3mm}%
    \parbox[t]{20mm}{\raggedright%
        \hspace{0pt}\myValue%\strut%
    }\par
}

\begin{document}

    \myKeyValuePair
    \myKeyValuePair
    \myKeyValuePair

\end{document}

When uncommenting the \strut commands hyphenation will no longer work.

My question is: How can I achieve hyphenation of the first word in a parbox AND have vertical spacing between parboxes in consecutive lines?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Answer 1

The word potential to hyphenation in TeX is a sequence of letters (nonzero \lccode) started by glue (i.e. \hskip or inter-word glue) and ended by something different than box or line. The algorithm is more complicated but the sentence mentioned above is substantial. And \strut is box or line. This negates the hyphenation. You need to use this code:

    \strut\hskip0pt\relax\myKey\nobreak\hskip0pt\strut

and

    \strut\hskip0pt\relax\myValue\nobreak\hskip0pt\strut

Now, the word is started by \hskip and it is eded by \hskip too. Both \struts (before and after) are significant because the height of the first strut is used and the depth of the second strut is used too.