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I am writing documents with British and American spelling, and I have noticed that some 'common' words are not hyphenated. Examples include 'quar-ter-ly', 'pro-pen-si-ty', 'eu-ro-pean'. This can result in too much interword space (in my opinion), and I have to identify these instances manually.

I want to make sure that I am using everything correctly. For British spelling I use something like:

\documentclass[UKenglish]{scrartcl}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{hyphenat}

I know hyph-utf8 and load \input{ushyphex} for AE documents.

I have the following questions:

  • For BE, is loadhyph-en-gb loaded automatically when babel is loaded with british spelling?

  • Is there anything else I can do to ensure that some 'common' words are hyphenated.

  • If not, is there a way to identify where the typesetting could be improved so that I can create a hyphenation pattern myself?

Some related questions: LaTeX Hyphenation, Why does \usepackage[british]{babel} hyphenate the word "alternate" incorrectly?, How to add global hyphenation rules?, Where can I find a list of English hyphenation exceptions?

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Jörg
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  • Two of the three example words you've given -- quarterly and european -- are hyphenated correctly by LaTeX either out-of-box or with babel loaded with either the english (for US-English) or the british (for UK-english) option set, i.e., as quar-terly and eu-ro-pean. For English-language documents, the typographic convention is to set \righthyphenmin to 3; thus, inserting a hyphenation point before ly and an would not be considered standard typographic practice. This is, of course, quite different from, say, German language typographic practice. – Mico Nov 29 '14 at 13:27
  • @Mico Then I don't understand what's going on. "European" and "Quarterly" do not break (in my bibliography). Only after I specify the pattern myself they break correctly at "Euro-pean" and "Quar-terly". – Jörg Nov 29 '14 at 13:32
  • In your example, it looks like it's the global option UKenglish (which gets passed on to babel) that's causing the words quarterly, propensity, and european not to get hyphenated at all. Replace UKenglish with english and the problem disappears. – Mico Nov 29 '14 at 13:46
  • @Mico Well, but that is my question: I need to distinguish between AE and BE. If I use english US patterns are used. How can I fix this for BE? loadhyph-en-gb is supposed to break 90% of all words correctly. Is this loaded automatically with babel? – Jörg Nov 29 '14 at 13:52
  • There are also many words in BE that are not broken correctly: invest-igate, beha-vioural. So my question: are the patterns in loadhyph-en-gb wrong or simply not loaded? – Jörg Nov 29 '14 at 14:29
  • I suspect that TeX's and babel's hyphenation rules are in no way complete, for just about any (human) language out there. Whereas a 90% rate of correct hyphenations may sound pretty impressive, it needn't be adequate for any given document. E.g., if your document happens to have a lot of words that fall into the 10% residual, you may not be all that impressed. – Mico Nov 29 '14 at 14:49
  • If I set the language to british, I get in-vest-ig-ate and be-ha-vi-oural. Your TeX system seems to be broken. – egreg Sep 05 '15 at 21:28

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