[texhax] description of text in {\tt }

Pierre MacKay pierre.mackay at comcast.net
Wed Jan 28 07:19:07 CET 2009


I am in complete agreement with reinhard, both about the needless use of 
typewriter fonts and about the avoidance of Times Roman in places where 
it doesn't belong.  (A very minor point, though---what Stanley Morison 
released to the world in the 1930s was Times Roman.  Times New Roman is 
a relatively recent update.)

But I am puzzled by the statement that it is impossible to hyphenate 
typewriter fonts.  Here is what I get in plain TeX.

*\tentt
 
*\showthe\font
 > \tentt .
<recently read> \font
                      
*\showhyphens{hyphenation}
 
Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) detected at line 0
[] \tenrm hy-phen-ation
 
*\showthe\font
 > \tentt .
<recently read> \font

which woud seem to indicate that \tentt has no trouble with hyphenation. 

I could turn it off by setting the \hyphenchar for \tentt to -1, or I 
could set \lefthyphenmin to 10000 in any \tt environment, but the 
default appears to be to permit hyphenation in a \tentt environment. 

That said, by all means follow Reinhard's advice and use Charter, or 
Palatino, or Computer Modern for letters rather than typewriter font.  
If you really need a monospaced font, dear old Courier is still a 
reliable resource. 

Pierre MacKay



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