[OS X TeX] underlined variable, how to make it line break.

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Sat Apr 5 08:13:55 EDT 2008


On 5 avr. 08, at 13:11, Joseph C. Slater PE, PhD wrote:
>
> The actual document illustrating the problem is posted at:
> http://www.cs.wright.edu/~jslater/classes/thesis/WSUThesisTemplate.zip
>
> Look at the 2nd page of the pdf and you can see the problem. The sty  
> file has the text but for a variable used for the title that refuses  
> to line break!

Same behavior observed here. Looking the doc of the ulem package  
(namely, the text after \endinput in ulem.sty), one can find:

One important incompatibility with braces and macro replacement:
ALL THE TEXT IN BRACES OR COMING FROM A MACRO IS TYPESET IN A BOX.
That is, braces will suppress stretching and linebreaks in the text they
enclose.  Moreover, the specially-taken-care-of commands \-, \\,  
\newline
and \linebreak are usually ignored if they appear inside extra braces.
They operate only when the braces delimit a command parameter without
introducing a level of grouping.  (Even though braces delimiting command
parameters do not normally imply grouping, many commands will add their
own grouping.)  Thus, you should try to limit inner braces to short  
bits of
text or for delimiting parameters to commands. For emergency repairs,  
see
the "Marat/Sade" example below.  Syntactical spaces inside braces never
cause a problem, nor do spaces in math mode.

I looked at the Marat/Sade example, but did not manage to adapt it to  
your case.

Trying soul as an alternative to ulem (I was just looking at the FAQ  
when Maarten's post arrived) does not seem to work either: text is  
broken across lines, but not the line under it.

Bruno



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