On 11/21/2008 12:01 PM, Lars Huttar wrote:
So as far as we know, nobody has successfully used \sethyphenatedurlbefore/after/etc. to tune the url-breaking mechanism. Has anybody else on the list done this?
If not, maybe the mkii implementation has never worked for that purpose... it's possible, since urls are breaking after hyphens when lang-url.mkii says to break before hyphens.
If this is the case (\sethyphenatedbefore/after in mkii is broken), then rather than awaiting a fix for the soon-obsolete mkii implementation, maybe I can do a workaround. I need help with the tex details though, please, as I am still very much a tex newbie...
We are generating our tex document, so verbosity is not a problem, but irregularity would be. Rather than inserting \break in various places manually, which would have to be redone often, I could automatically insert \discretionary or \allowbreak before/after the appropriate characters in the tex document. Would that work? How would I suppress hyphenation at other points -- \dontleavehmode or something like that?
OK... I have a working workaround... close your eyes, because it's ugly. I just put \hbox{} around the sections that we don't want broken, and \discretionary{}{}{} in the places we will allow a break: \hbox{http://}\discretionary{}{}{}\hbox{www}\discretionary{}{}{}\hbox{.sil}\discretionary{}{}{}\hbox{.org/}\discretionary{}{}{}\hbox{silesr/}... One of our URLs goes from 89 to 391 characters! :-p Maybe posting this awful kluge to the list will motivate someone who knows TeX better to post a more elegant solution. :-) Ugly as it is, it does allow me to control exactly where I want to allow a break and where I don't. So I'll go with that for now, in order to meet our deadline. I'm sure someone could write a TeX macro to do the above algorithmically instead of brute-force specifying every possible break point explicitly. But that's what \hyphenatedurl is supposed to be, and it doesn't seem to be working for me. Regards, Lars