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I'm writing a text in Spanish, and I have a phrase wrote between em-dashes (that work like parentheses). The problem is that if the "opening" em-dash is too near the end of the line, then it may happen that it remains in that line but the next word falls to the next:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam a leo quis 
libero ---accumsan vulputate---. Praesent pretium dapibus est interdum 
hendrerit.

bad result

What I need to get in this example, is the opening em-dash and its next word to be in the same line, like this:

good result

where I had to use

\mbox{---accumsan}

Is there a simple way to make LaTeX not to break the opening em-dash with its next word, and also the ending em-dash with its previous word?

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2 Answers 2

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Since you are writing in Spanish, you surely are using the spanish option for babel. If this is the case, then you can use the shorthand "+-- to prevent a possible line break. A little example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}

\begin{document}

%wrong output:
\noindent Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam a leo quis 
 ---accumsan vulputate---. Praesent pretium dapibus est interdum 
hendrerit.

%right output:
\noindent Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam a leo quis 
 "+--accumsan vulputate"+--. Praesent pretium dapibus est interdum 
hendrerit.

\end{document}

enter image description here​

Another option is to use the \nobreakdash command implemented by the amsmath package; this command suppresses any line break after the dash (or hyphen). Of course, if you are going to use this a lot, you can define a new command to simplify the writing. In the following example I defined two commands using \nobreakdash: the first variant will prevent hyphenation of the word following the em-dash; the second variant will allow normal hyphenation in the following word:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}

\newcommand\RayaN{\nobreakdash---}
\newcommand\Rayan{\nobreakdash---\hspace{0pt}}

\begin{document}

\noindent Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam a leo quis 
 ---accumsan vulputate---. Praesent pretium dapibus est interdum 
hendrerit.

\noindent Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam a leo quis 
 \RayaN accumsan vulputate\RayaN. Praesent pretium dapibus est interdum 
hendrerit.

\noindent Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam a leo quis 
 \Rayan accumsan vulputate\Rayan. Praesent pretium dapibus est interdum 
hendrerit.

\end{document}​

enter image description here

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  • I would suggest the addition of xspace to accommodate for the following scenario the requires an end-of-command-sequence space: ...a leo quis \Rayan accumsan vulputate\Rayan lorem ipsum.... This OP did mention that the em-dashes act like parentheses.
    – Werner ♦
    Oct 25, 2011 at 5:30
  • Thank you Gonzalo, it worked perfectly using "+-- with babel (which I was already using, as you correctly thought).
    – Nicolás Ozimica
    Oct 26, 2011 at 2:54
2

You can set \exhyphenpenalty=10000. After this, the hyphen-like places (generated by - or -- or --- are unbreakable.

Advantage: The setting can be done only once at beginning of the document. You needn't to change the markup of the document.

Disadvantage: the word immediately followed after --- is not hyphenated. If this brings the problem, you can insert explicitly hyphen points in this word by \-.

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  • 1
    You should note that also compound words will not be broken at the hyphen.
    – egreg
    Jan 31, 2015 at 16:44

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