Hyphenation of terms containing symbols other than letters

Question

I'm trying to hyphenate a chemical name and have come into difficulty. The word I'm trying to hyphenate is poly(ethyeneglycol).

I'm using babel and inputenc. I've tried specifying a custom hyphenation pattern using \hyphenation{poly(ethylene-glycol)} but it fails to complete.

Being chemistry terminology I wondered if this was dealt with by a chemistry package such as mhchem but have not found a package that does it.

Answer 1

Techically, ( and ) are not letters, so they won't participate to hyphenation. You can make them acceptable with the following trick, which should have no adverse effect with normal input:

\lccode`\(=`\(
\lccode`\)=`\) 
\hyphenation{poly(ethylene-glycol)}

A different strategy could be to define a macro:

\newcommand{\Q}[1]{(\nobreak\hspace{0pt}#1)}
\hyphenation{ethylene-glycol} % TeX incorrectly hyphenates this word

and use

poly\Q{ethyleneglycol}