[texhax] Hyphenation problem with makeindex

[Rodolfo Medina]

Rodolfo Medina wrote:

> It seems that makeindex cannot hyphenate words: it produces an overfull box
> instead of hyphenating.  I broke the word with: `ex\-ample', as usual in plain
> TeX, but nothing.
>
> Can anyone help?



Oleg Katsitadze wrote:

> 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.



karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) writes:

> Also, some \raggedright's explicitly disable hyphenation completely.
> In that case, you may need (something like)
> \hyphenpenalty=50
> \exhyphenpenalty=50



Oleg's suggestion seems to work the problem out in the sense that the overfull
box is avoided, although hyphenation is not done either; instead,

\hyphenpenalty=50
\exhyphenpenalty=50

produces no result: we have no hyphenation *and* overfull box.


Rodolfo