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}
\raggedright
to avoid large spaces between the word. – Will Robertson Nov 7 '10 at 11:07\hyphenpenalty=5000
) – Cyriac Antony Aug 19 '19 at 8:31microtype
. (Not compatible with XeTeX, unfortunately.) This stretches the font slightly to reduce the amount of extra spacing. – Davislor Jan 22 at 14:13