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In a text, I get an overfull hbox. To avoid this, I define an optional hyphenation point:

bla bla bla un\-known bla bla bla

pdflatex indeed hyphenates the word at that point. But when I declare the optional hyphenation point in the preamble like this

\hyphenation{un-known}

then pdflatex will NOT hyphenate there. The reason seems to be that LaTeX still thinks that the typeset text does not look good enough with the line break after 'un-'. But then why is the behavior different for the inline optional hyphenation to the optional hyphenation declared in the preamble?

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  • Are you using multiple languages with babel?
    – egreg
    Apr 7, 2012 at 15:45
  • 1
    If you can process your document with LuaTeX: include the package lua-visual-debug and you'll see the possible hyphenation points.
    – topskip
    Apr 7, 2012 at 16:07

1 Answer 1

6

Try adding \showthe\lefthyphenmin so TeX stops and shows the value of this parameter. If it is set more than 2 then automatic hyphenation will never break after 2 letters. The default (for English) is 2, but some language setups change this.

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  • No babel package used; but \showthe\lefthyphemin did the trick. It was set to 3. After setting it to 2 (simply use \lefthyphenmin=2), my optional hyphenation work as expected. Thanks for the hint.
    – Klaus
    Apr 9, 2012 at 12:19

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