185

I can't find where I can remove any kind of hyphenation and just have LaTeX just do a line break.

edit: Honestly speaking I just don't like to read hyphenation anywhere and that's the only reason why I wanted to remove it. It is a matter of style, probably unexpected in LaTeX.

The document has only a summary in a different language and I used the language packages to hyphenate properly.

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  • 34
    If you are going to typeset your document without hyphenation I strongly recommend using \raggedright to avoid large spaces between the word. – Will Robertson Nov 7 '10 at 11:07
  • @WillRobertson But, the document looks too bad. In there a middle road? (for instance like \hyphenpenalty=5000) – Cyriac Antony Aug 19 '19 at 8:31
  • @cyriac I guess you want the ragged2e package. – Will Robertson Aug 19 '19 at 12:13
169

This is discussed in detail in the TeX FAQ. Summarising the information given there:

  1. You can set \hyphenpenalty and \exhyphenpenalty to 10000, which will stop hyphenation, but as TeX will still try to hyphenate this is not hugely efficient.

  2. As Joel says, you can use \usepackage[none]{hyphenat} to select a 'language' with no hyphenation at all. This works fine for a single language document, but not if you want to use babel or polyglossia for other language-specific effects.

  3. Setting \righthyphenmin and \lefthyphenmin to very large values will prevent hyphenation as it tells TeX that it must have more characters in the word than are going to be available. The suggested value in the FAQ is 62.

  4. You can set \hyphenchar\font=-1, which will prevent hyphenation for the current font: this is probably not the best way for an entire document but is how it is done for the tt font shape in LaTeX.

Now, of those (2) is probably the best choice. However, what you did not say is why you want no hyphenation. TeX hyphenates when it cannot find a good line break without it, so you get few hyphens in most cases. The risk with no hyphenation at all is that the output looks bad.

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  • 5
    @Splashy: see Will's comment about using \raggedright. – Joseph Wright♦ Nov 9 '10 at 18:53
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    @Splashy: The issue is that in order to do that you end up with unacceptably-long gaps between words (see what happens in a word processor). You can let TeX make bigger gaps using the \sloppy macro, which will hopefully avoid text running into the margins when there is no hyphenation. However, the effect may well be very bad looking. That's really the whole point here: TeX hyphenates to keep a good appearance only when acceptable fiddling with spacing has failed. – Joseph Wright♦ Nov 9 '10 at 19:09
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    Oh, also consider loading the microtype package, as this enables some other approaches to improving spacing and reducing the need for hyphenation in many cases. – Joseph Wright♦ Nov 9 '10 at 19:10
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    @Juan: One reason why one might want to avoid hyphenation is because the journal they're submitting to forbids its use: tandfonline.com/action/…. – Sara Apr 17 '13 at 9:13
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    Adding to Sara's comment, I would claim that hyphenation is for documents in their final stage (i.e. ready to print). Since those of us who submit manuscripts to journals and book publishers are not submitting "final stage" documents, there's no need to hyphenate. And most publishers do not want to receive manuscripts with hyphenations, since they don't want to guess when a hyphenated word is intended, and when it is there because of a line break. I'd recommend using \raggedright - it's the simplest solution. – Sverre Apr 10 '14 at 18:54
77

I use this and it works great for me in almost all documents:

\tolerance=1
\emergencystretch=\maxdimen
\hyphenpenalty=10000
\hbadness=10000

\being{document}... yadda yadda
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  • 4
    Good answer, the previous solutions mess up my document, this works for me!!! – richardtk_1 Apr 9 '15 at 21:46
  • When I used hyphenpenalty=10000 alone some words pass the margin. This works great. – Gokce Mehmet AY Aug 21 '15 at 11:24
  • This worked for me with Share Latex, and it avoids the problem of words going over the right-hand margin. – timothyjgraham Mar 6 '16 at 2:58
  • This worked ultimately...Thank you so much..@Timharris – David Jul 9 '16 at 13:15
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    Thank you! All of the other answers that I've seen make the words overflow into the margin rather than wrapping to the next line. – Sumner Evans Nov 2 '16 at 21:06
61

A quick google found

\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}

and more useful info here.

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  • 1
    Note that this silently breaks the breaklines option of the listings package. See stackoverflow.com/a/8264050/1650137. – Zero3 Jan 3 '16 at 4:15
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    Another reason for not using hyphenation is if you want a textually 'clean' way to cut-and-paste to other editing environments. For example I cut-and-paste text from the typeset PDF that LaTeX generates into other editing packages when I work with colleagues who do not use LaTeX (and aren't likely to either). – Aldoaldo Apr 15 '16 at 8:00
30

If one uses babel, there's the hyphsubst package by Heiko Oberdiek:

\documentclass[a4paper]
...
\usepackage[german=nohyphenation,french=nohyphenation]{hyphsubst}
\usepackage[german,french]{babel}

provided the distribution knows about the virtual language nohyphenation that has no patterns (both TeX Live and MiKTeX should know it).

If this is not the case, the following hack is equivalent

\makeatletter\chardef\l@nohyphenation=255 \makeatother
\usepackage[german=nohyphenation,french=nohyphenation]{hyphsubst}

(at least if less than 256 languages are already defined in the format, which is quite likely).

TeX will still possibly break lines at explicit hyphens, though.

To explain it better: if you get an error about 

Unknown pattern nohyphenation

then the document should be like

\documentclass[a4paper]

\makeatletter\chardef\l@nohyphenation=255 \makeatother
\usepackage[german=nohyphenation,french=nohyphenation]{hyphsubst}
\usepackage[german,french]{babel}
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    I am sorry, but I searched hyphsubst manual for the option nohyphenation, and I got nothing. I would be grateful if you could update your answer if it needs. – Diaa May 5 '17 at 17:03
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    @DiaaAbidou There is no nohyphenation option: the options are of the form language1=language2 and nohyphenation chooses a language with no hyphenation pattern. – egreg May 5 '17 at 17:06
  • I tried to compile a MWE with your code of babel, but it gives me an error Package hyphsubst Error: Unknown pattern nohyphenation.' \ProcessOptions*. Would you like me to post a new question about it? – Diaa May 5 '17 at 17:15
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    @DiaaAbidou Then you have to follow the second strategy: “If this is not the case…” – egreg May 5 '17 at 17:17
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    @DiaaAbidou You're welcome! – egreg May 5 '17 at 17:35
1

You can use the command:

\raggedright

or the environment:

\begin{flushleft}
\end{flushleft}

§ Paragraph alignment

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