Hyphenation in Beamer Presentations

Question

I am using beamer in LaTeX to create a presentation. But it seems hyphenation is disabled. At least for the items inside itemize environments and text inside the blocks I don't see any hyphenation while by eye inspection I expect LaTeX to do automatic hyphenation and produce nicer paragraphs.

Is there any specific command so that I can force LaTeX to run automatic hyphenation?

Yes, it is disabled. IIRC, the standpoint on this (which one may or may not disagree with) is "if you need automatic hyphenation, you have too much text on your slides; and, like a heading, every slide warrants manual hyphenation". — Ulrich Schwarz, Feb 14 '12 at 11:23
I'll be even more extreme than @UlrichSchwarz: If you have more than ten words on your slides, you have too much text... — Brent.Longborough, Feb 14 '12 at 14:15
@Brent - that limit applies to each slide, or to all of them combined? ;) — Michael Palmer, Feb 14 '12 at 19:58
@MichaelPalmer: The former if you're really garrulous, the latter if not... (¦-} — Brent.Longborough, Feb 14 '12 at 20:39
So anyways is there a solution? Even for manually enabling hyphenation wherever it seems necessary? — MikeL, Feb 15 '12 at 15:45
Simply enclose the necessary to-be-hyphenated text within a \parbox. — Simon Kuang, Nov 05 '13 at 06:16

score 17 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:34

Actually, beamer doesn't disable hyphenation. However, as \raggedright instead of justified text is used, hyphenation becomes nearly impossible. You can use the ragged2e package which provides the \RaggedRight macro to get better results:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\let\raggedright=\RaggedRight
\usepackage{kantlipsum} % only used to generate dummy text
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\begin{itemize}
\item \kant[1]
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Compare the output of \raggedright and \RaggedRight:

$\raggedright (no hyphenation) on the left, \RaggedRight (with hyphenation) on the right$

danger Still, I totally agree with the comments you already received: If you actually need automatic hyphenation, you should probably think about reducing the amount of text on your slides!

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 24 '18 at 10:34

In some languages you will have really long words. So reducing the number of words as suggested in some comments is simply not possible. You can set a parbox around your text to get hyphenation working. e.g.:

\parbox{\linewidth}{text with possible long words to hyphenate}

Here is a fully working example using \hy{text} as a helper for reusing command several times:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel} % example language with long words                                                                                                                                                                                
\def\hy#1{\parbox{\linewidth}{#1}} % helper for using command several times                                                                                                                                                                   
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  \hy{Die Speicherverwaltungsadressen der heutigen
  Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften eines
  Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftsmitarbeiters haben
  siebentausendzweihundertvierundachtzig Zeilen.}
  \bigskip
  \begin{itemize}
    \item \hy{Speicherverwaltungsadressen Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften}
  \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Results with and without parbox:

Bullet position can be repaired using position parameter for parbox: \parbox[t]. — colidyre, Oct 24 '18 at 13:04
The question was: Is there any specific command so that I can force LaTeX to run automatic hyphenation? And imho the question is well answered by showing that using the specific command \parbox works with hyphenation. — colidyre, Jul 07 '22 at 19:42
The suggested ´\parbox` isn't turning on automatic hyphenation in beamer. Of course there are various forms of environment changes and other local tricks that can force hyphenation but they have to be used everywhere. — Nobody-Knows-I-am-a-Dog, Jul 09 '22 at 21:16

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 09 '21 at 11:54

0

I guess regardless of how much text you have on the slides, you should be able to syllabify the text.

When I need to, I enclose the entire slide in a minipage environment:

\begin{frame}
\begin{minipage}[l]{\textwidth}
Lots of text, formulas and figures...
\end{minipage}
\end{frame}

Maybe not a very elegant solution, but it works for me.

edited Mar 09 '21 at 11:54

Ingmar

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answered Mar 09 '21 at 11:39

Moshe ben Maimon

1

Hyphenation in Beamer Presentations

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