Dealing with overfull hbox in lstinline

Question

I have the following command:

\newcommand*{\code}{\lstinline[basicstyle=\relscale{0.9}\ttfamily\color{inline code},keywordstyle=\color{inline code},stringstyle=\color{inline code},keepspaces=true]}

I am using this extensively throughout my book, and sometimes the inline code is fairly long (such as a fully-qualified class name). This is causing hbox overflow problems, which is understandable because TeX is unable to hyphenate the code.

One approach that works is to break long code up, so instead of this:

\code{AReallyLongClassName}

I can do this:

\code{A}\-\code{Really}\-\code{Long}\-\code{Class}\-\code{Name}

Whilst this works, it would be really laborious going through all my \code usages and converting them. Also, it makes the source harder to read.

I've been reading through a few existing questions on this matter and found some advice to do this:

\usepackage[htt]{hyphenat} % enable line breaks

However, that seems to only be supported with texttt, which I'm not using (and am not familiar enough with it to know whether I should be using it, but what I've read suggests not).

I've also tried this:

\hyphenation{A-Really-Long-Class-Name}

But that also seems to be ignored by lstinline.

Here is a MWE:

% !TEX program = xelatex

\documentclass[fontsize=11pt,pagesize=auto,hidelinks,cleardoublepage=empty,parskip]{book}

\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{relsize}

\usepackage[paperheight=10in,paperwidth=6in,margin=2cm,heightrounded,bindingoffset=5mm,showframe=false]{geometry}

\sloppy

\newcommand*{\code}{\lstinline[basicstyle=\relscale{0.9}\ttfamily\color{red},keywordstyle=\color{red},stringstyle=\color{red},keepspaces=true]}

\begin{document}

Here is a paragraph with some inline code. \code{ReallyLongName.First.Second.Third.Fourth.Fifth}.

Here is a paragraph with some inline code. \code{Really}\-\code{Long}\-\code{Name}\-\code{.First}\-\code{.Second}\-\code{.Third}\-\code{.Fourth}\-\code{.Fifth}.
\end{document}

Output:

Is there a better solution here?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 10 '18 at 11:28

You can add the breaklines option to \lstinline. This will allow breaks for example at ., which should be enough for example for fully qualified class names:

% !TEX program = xelatex

\documentclass[fontsize=11pt,pagesize=auto,hidelinks,cleardoublepage=empty,parskip]{book}

\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{relsize}

\usepackage[paperheight=10in,paperwidth=6in,margin=2cm,heightrounded,bindingoffset=5mm,showframe=false]{geometry}

\sloppy

\newcommand*{\code}{\lstinline[basicstyle=\relscale{0.9}\ttfamily\color{red},keywordstyle=\color{red},stringstyle=\color{red},keepspaces=true,breaklines]}

\begin{document}

Here is a paragraph with some inline code. \code{ReallyLongName.First.Second.Third.Fourth.Fifth}.
\end{document}

Perhaps I shouldn't have used periods in my example, since that is only the problem some of the time. Often it's just a long class name that causes overfull hbox, so if there's no period to break at it will still exhibit this problem. — Kent Boogaart, Mar 11 '18 at 02:55

Dealing with overfull hbox in lstinline

1 Answers1