Comment désactiver complètement la coupure des mots?

Cela peut sembler une drôle d'idée (après tout, la qualité de son algorithme de césure est l'une des forces de TeX) mais c'est parfois nécessaire.

TeX offre quatre façons différentes de supprimer la césure (il n'y en avait que deux jusqu'à la version 3 de TeX).

Tout d'abord, on peut donner aux pénalités de césure \hyphenpenalty et \exhyphenpenalty des valeurs « infinies » (c'est-à-dire 10000, pour TeX). Cela signifie que toute césure pénalisera suffisamment la ligne qui la contiendrait pour qu'elle n'ait pas lieu. L'inconvénient de cette méthode est que le moteur TeX recalculera tout paragraphe pour lequel les césures pourraient être utiles, ce qui le ralentira.

Césure standard:

%
%

Sans césure:

\hyphenpenalty=10000
\exhyphenpenalty=10000

Second, one can select a language for which no hyphenation patterns exist. Some distributions create a language nohyphenation, and the hyphenat package uses this technique for its \nohyphens command which sets its argument without any hyphenation. You can load hyphenat with the command

\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}

to prevent any hyphenation in a single-language document. The technique cannot work in a document in which babel controls language selection, since babel incorporates hyphenation change into its language change facilities.

Les variables \lefthyphenmin et \righthyphenmin définissent la longueur minimale des fragments à gauche et à droite (respectivement) d'une coupure de mot, en nombre de caractères.

Les valeurs standard en français et anglais sont:

\lefthyphenmin=2
\righthyphenmin=3

Si vous leur donnez une valeur plus grande que la longueur du plus long mot existant, vous désactiverez de fait la césure. La valeur généralement conseillée est 62.

Les trois exemples ci-dessous n'utilisent pas babel, pour un résultat plus illustratif.

Césure standard:

\lefthyphenmin=2
\righthyphenmin=3

Petites valeurs:

\lefthyphenmin=1
\righthyphenmin=1

Grandes valeurs:

\lefthyphenmin=62
\righthyphenmin=62

Fourth, one can suppress hyphenation for all text using the current font by the command

\hyphenchar\font=-1

This isn't a particularly practical way for users to suppress hyphenation — the command has to be issued for every font the document uses — but it's how LaTeX itself suppresses hyphenation in tt and other fixed-width fonts.

Which of the techniques you should use depends on what you actually want to do. If the text whose hyphenation is to be suppressed runs for less than a paragraph, your only choice is the no-hyphens language: the language value is preserved along with the text (in the same way that the current font is); the values for penalties and hyphen minima active at the end of a paragraph are used when hyphenation is calculated.

Contrariwise, if you are writing a multilanguage document using the babel package, you cannot suppress hyphenation throughout using either the no-hyphens language or the hyphen minima: all those values get changed at a babel language switch: use the penalties instead.

If you simply switch off hyphenation for a good bit of text, the output will have a jagged edge (with many lines seriously overfull), and your (La)TeX run will bombard you with warnings about overfull and underfull boxes (that is, really, lines). To avoid this you have two options.

The simplest route is to use \sloppy (or its environment version sloppypar), and have TeX stretch what would otherwise be underfull lines to fill the space offered, while prematurely wrapping overfull lines and stretching the remainder.

The better bet is to set the text ragged right, and at least get rid of the overfull lines; this technique is “traditional” (in the sense that typists have always done it) and may be expected to appeal to the specifiers of eccentric document layouts (such as those for dissertations), but for once their sense conforms with typographic style. (Or at least, style constrained in this curious way.)

Sources:

• Stopping all hyphenation,
• How to prevent LaTeX from hyphenating the entire document?