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How can I suppress hyphenation in biblatex?

(I know that only one sentence usually is considered bad question quality, but why over-complicate a simple (?) problem)

Jan
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    You want that the bibliography is printed with no hyphenation? – egreg Apr 21 '13 at 16:39
  • See hyphenpenalty: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/51263/what-are-penalties-and-which-ones-are-defined – Marco Daniel Apr 21 '13 at 16:40
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    Could you add a MWE that shows undesired hyphenation, so that a) other users don’t have to create that themselves and b) we can clearly compare before and after? (This is partially responding to your remark about a one sentence question.) – doncherry Apr 21 '13 at 16:57

1 Answers1

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It's a good idea to disable hyphenation in bibliographies, but it will only yield acceptable results if you also disable justification, that is, if you set your bibliography with no hyphenation plus ragged-right (to suppress awkward stretching and shrinking of inter-word space). The command that switches to a right rag and (implicitly) turns off hyphenation is \raggedright.

Now, biblatex has a command called \bibsetup:

\bibsetup: Arbitrary code to be executed at the beginning of the bibliography, intended for commands which affect the layout of the bibliography.

So let's append \raggedright to whatever else is already contained in \bibsetup:

\documentclass[10pt,DIV=5]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{testbib.bib}
@INCOLLECTION{Cahn97,
  author = {Cahn, Michael},
  title = {Die Rhetorik der Wissenschaft im Medium der Typographie: Zum Beispiel die Fußnote},
  year = {1997},
  pages = {91-109},
  crossref = {RHW97}}
\end{filecontents}

\appto{\bibsetup}{\raggedright}
\bibliography{testbib.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{Cahn97}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
Community
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Nils L
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    Is there a solution when using biblatex (instead of bibtex)? – Jeffrey Goldberg Nov 30 '16 at 22:34
  • Why is it a good idea to disable hyphenation in bibliographies? – Paul Wintz Aug 24 '23 at 20:17
  • Bibliographies tend to (a) consist of very short paragraphs, usually 1 to 3 lines, and (b) contain a high frequency of difficult-to-automatically-hyphenate words, mainly due to the signficant role that author's first and last names, from languages across the globe, play. So, both from a technical as well as from an aesthetic perspective, a ragged-right, non-hyphenated bibliographies are worth giving a try. (Particularly when, as in my and probably Jan's case, your main language of writing is one that tends to produce words that, on average, are much longer than in, say, English.) – Nils L Sep 22 '23 at 19:45