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I would like to recreate something like the following image from Lives of the Presidents in Words of One Syllable. While most of the text uses monosyllabic words, the words which had more than one syllable were printed with hyphens between each syllable.

Page from "Lives of the Presidents in Words of One Syllable"

I would like to find a way to use TeX or LaTeX to display the text this way without my needing to break the words manually in the body of the document.

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  • Please take a look at tex.stackexchange.com/a/218308/142180, it seems to do what you want.
    – Oleg Lobachev
    Commented Jan 25, 2019 at 21:05
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    @OlegLobachev If only does part of what you want, because the Tex hyphenation patterns are for hyphenation not syllabification which is what the OP wants. TeX will not automatically hyphenate all words, and will often only find some but not all of the syllable breaks. For hyphenation in "normal" typesetting, it is more important not to create any incorrect hyphens than to find every correct one. You can add exceptions to the rules with the \hyphenation macro, of course, so you only have to "syllabify" each word once if it isn't handled automatically.
    – alephzero
    Commented Jan 25, 2019 at 22:19
  • It looks like tex.stackexchange.com/questions/55282/… may have some options that would work for small documents. I will need to look into this further, when I have some time.
    – Tavrock
    Commented Jan 25, 2019 at 22:49
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    @Tavrock unfortunately all those ideas only work for hyphenation. If you look at the examples carefully, you will see syllables that are not split - for example hy-phen-ation not hy-phen-a-tion. In some languages (e.g. Latin) the syllabification rules are very rigidly defined and TeX can find all possible hyphenation points, but that doesn't apply to English, where some homonyms even have different hyphenations from each other - e.g. the verb de-sert and the noun des-ert. (TeX doesn't hyphenate that word at all).
    – alephzero
    Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 1:11
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    Actually, that was my question, not my answer. I just thought the color separation of syllables (hyphenation points) was pretty.
    – John Kormylo
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 17:52

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