[texhax] Hyphenation problem with makeindex

[Oleg Katsitadze]

On Sun, Apr 01, 2007 at 08:58:57PM +0300, Oleg Katsitadze wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 01, 2007 at 05:33:49PM +0200, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> > I'll take a look at those macros, which, if I understand what you say, cancel
> > TeX's capability of hyphenating?
> 
> That's what I meant.  They not necessarily disable hyphenation
> directly, but may cause a side effect -- something like that.

It occurred to me that the problem you have is related to the badness.
The index is (usually) typeset in ragged-right mode, but a good
ragged-right setting does not just allow lines to break anywhere, it
still does badness checking to avoid very short lines (it's somewhere
in The TeXbook, look up \raggedright in the index).  So, your
discretionary hyphen (\-) is ignored simply because breaking there
would be too bad, according to TeX's notion.  The solution is to
change TeX's notion about badness -- try tweaking \tolerance setting
for the index.

HTH,
Oleg