[OS X TeX] Hyphenation

[Piet van Oostrum]

>>>>> Hans van Maanen <hans at vanmaanen.org> (HvM) wrote:

>HvM> Hi all --
>HvM> In the Dutch language macro dutch.dtx, we can use  "-  to hyphenate a word
>HvM> while still enabling the rest of the word to be hyphenated, so that common
>HvM> Dutch words like diphosphate-phosphohydrolase do not result in underfull
>HvM> boxes.

>HvM> I would like to use this as standard behaviour, so that every - in my
>HvM> text will be understood as "- and has full hyphenation. I'm sure it's
>HvM> just a \renewcommand somewhere, but I don't know how to do this.

I doubt that this will work. You can redefine - as follows:

\def\myhyph{"-}
\catcode`\-=13
\let-\myhyph

But then "- probably doesn't work anymore.
And moreover as soon as LaTeX needs to read in some file which contains -
in a negative number it won't work.

If you want to use - in math mode you will have to do something like:
\let\myminus-
\def\myhyph{"-}
\catcode`\-=13
\def-{\ifmmode\myminus\else\myhyph}

but that doesn't solve the problem with negative numbers. By the way, this
problem will only appear with negative numbers in files that will be read
after this code. Files that have been read before will have the proper
minus signs.

De mazzel.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP]
Private email: piet at vanoostrum.org
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