I'm trying to hyphenate a chemical name and have come into difficulty. The word I'm trying to hyphenate is poly(ethyeneglycol).
I'm using babel and inputenc. I've tried specifying a custom hyphenation pattern using \hyphenation{poly(ethylene-glycol)} but it fails to complete.
Being chemistry terminology I wondered if this was dealt with by a chemistry package such as mhchem but have not found a package that does it.
Techically, ( and ) are not letters, so they won't participate to hyphenation. You can make them acceptable with the following trick, which should have no adverse effect with normal input:
\lccode`\(=`\(
\lccode`\)=`\)
\hyphenation{poly(ethylene-glycol)}
A different strategy could be to define a macro:
\newcommand{\Q}[1]{(\nobreak\hspace{0pt}#1)}
\hyphenation{ethylene-glycol} % TeX incorrectly hyphenates this word
and use
poly\Q{ethyleneglycol}
\hyphenation{poly(ethylene-glycol)}. I corrected them all in your question, but perhaps your code needs to be corrected as well? Maybe is just a misspelling problem? – Vivi Jun 13 '12 at 16:19bpchemand the\IUPACmacro? – Joseph Wright Jun 13 '12 at 16:23