Prevent line-breaking after short words

Question

The publisher requires that most of short words (shorter then 4 chars, and all the prepositions, etc.) should not be left last on the line but kept with the following word.

Wrong:

Following the last theorem, we
can see that ...

Right:

Following the last theorem, 
we can see that ...

Yes I can use sed to replace such spaces with ~ but that's not right a solutionas it will affect math.

P.S. We are using a standard extbook class. Thanks in advance.

Good, I just thought that there might have been some rule regarding the minimal number of letters before/after a hyphenation, in which case Egreg's linked answer would have been helpful. Anyway, maybe somebody else looking at your question can be helped by Egreg's answer to the other question. — Stephen, Dec 17 '12 at 19:48

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 17 '12 at 14:47

7

I don't think a pure TeX solution is feasible (luatex might be possible).

If you can not accurately spot your math markup using sed/perl etc You could insert \shortwordspace rather than ~ directly and then define

 \protected\def\shortwordspace{\ifmmode\else~\fi}

so it does nothing in math mode.

answered Dec 17 '12 at 14:47

David Carlisle

757,742

Thanks David, I thought there is something like \shortwordpenalty for controlling that. – saabeilin Dec 17 '12 at 15:28
(> luatex might be possible ) I hacked something (probably buggy) in LuaTeX :-) here – ShreevatsaR Jul 09 '17 at 16:39

Prevent line-breaking after short words

1 Answers1

Linked