Break on special characters in inline verbatim

Question

I'm using Pandoc to generate LaTeX. My text contains inline code spans (backticks in markdown) that are rendered as \texttt{...} in TeX. However, some of them are quite long and overflow the line, for example this paragraph:

In the context of the variables
\texttt{\{"query": "mycelium", "number": 100\}}, this would be expanded to
the URI \texttt{http://www.example.com/foo?query=mycelium\&number=100}.

I cannot change the generated code since that would affect the output when rendering to HTML.

I tried to insert a unicode zero-width space, but pdflatex chokes on that. I cannot use TeX commands inside the verbatim environment since Pandoc escapes all those before outputting them inside a \texttt:

$ echo 'my `code\bar`' | pandoc -t latex
my \texttt{code\textbackslash{}bar}

So what I'm looking for is a TeX command that redefines \texttt to reflow the line when it's too long. Or alternatively, a command to break all words that are too long on special characters like ?=%&.

Edit: I tried the following but it doesn't have any effect (63 being the decimal ascii code point for ?):

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{lmodern} % with or without this...

% ... either of the following don't work:
\DeclareFontFamily{T1}{cmtt}{\hyphenchar \font=63}
\DeclareTextFontCommand{\mytexttt}{\ttfamily\hyphenchar\font=63\relax}

\begin{document}

In the context of the variables
\texttt{\{"query": "mycelium", "number": 100\}}, this would be expanded to
the very long long long URI \texttt{http://www.example.com/foo?query=mycelium\&number=100}.

\end{document}

You should rather teach Pandoc to use \url (package url or hyperref) instead of \texttt for URLs. — egreg, Oct 23 '14 at 14:48
possible duplicate of How to automatically hyphenate within \texttt? — Peter Grill, Oct 23 '14 at 14:51
@PeterGrill thanks, indeed I didn't find that question before. However, I tried it with no effect (see my edited question). I must be missing something... — mb21, Oct 23 '14 at 15:38
Pandoc can use fancyvrb and also lets you specify your own TeX template (#14 at Pandoc - Demos, so I'm not sure why it's using \texttt for inline code anyway. — Mike Renfro, Oct 23 '14 at 15:50
@MikeRenfro I'm guessing it's using fancyvrb only for special situations, and templates don't affect the stuff that it puts where the $body$ variable is. — mb21, Oct 23 '14 at 17:05
@egreg I'm not actually looking for a link (pandoc actually uses hyperref for those). I just want the \texttt to wrap on lines. — mb21, Oct 23 '14 at 17:06
@mb21 \url has facilities for breaking at various points in the URI. — egreg, Oct 23 '14 at 17:17
@egreg right, however I'd like to break any long text in a \texttt (like e.g. JSON without spaces), not just urls. — mb21, Oct 24 '14 at 10:52
url package provides the \url command which is just a version of verbatim allowing breaks. The corresponding command with hyperref is \nolinkurl. — Andrew Swann, Oct 25 '14 at 14:49

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 28 '14 at 14:07

1

Your example can't break at the ? because the first definition defines the hyphenchar for cmtt in T1 encoding (and you use lmodern) and the second defines \mytexttt but your document uses \texttt.

If you

replace \texttt with \mytexttt
or drop lmodern and use \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
or drop lmodern and use \DeclareFontFamily{OT1}{cmtt}{\hyphenchar \font=63}

then your example works for me (albeit with an overfull box as the ? comes too late.

answered Oct 28 '14 at 14:07

Frank Mittelbach

77,146

Thanks a lot! You're completely right. I guess I was almost there when I despaired :) – mb21 Oct 28 '14 at 15:35

Break on special characters in inline verbatim

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