On 4/25/25 10:56 AM, Carl Evans wrote:
Maria and Richard,
That makes sense now. Thanks for your help. In Microsoft Word you can
do this and it will automatically fit in the margins with or without
actual words. I thought Lyx would behave like this too.
It's one of the core principles behind LyX not to try to outsmart the
user. If you want to type 125 a's all in a row, we figure you've got a
reason to do that.
LaTeX has its own methods. It does do auto-hyphenation, and surprisingly
well (to my mind), though it sometimes needs help. In this case, as
Maria said, it simply has no idea how to hyphenate a long string of a's,
so it will issue a warning (overfull hbox, or something of that sort).
You can see it if, after compiling, you select Document> LaTeX Log, and
then hit the "Next Warning" button. By default, LyX does not show you
these warnings. Often, they can be ignored. They are, after all, just
warnings. Errors LyX will show you.
On hyphenation: You can manually add a possible hyphenation point via
Insert> Formatting> Hyphenation Point. If there's a particular word that
LaTeX consistently gets wrong, then you can tell LaTeX how to hyphenate
the word by putting something like:
\hyphenation{mis-o-gyn-is-tic}
\hyphenation{theo-rem}
into the LaTeX preamble. Better yet, collect such things in a style file
(say, myhyphens.sty), put that somewhere LaTeX can find it, and include
it in your various documents via: \usepackage{myhyphens}.
This is an example of the programmer's maxim to be lazy. It takes a
modicum of start up time to do this, and then pays off later when you
don't have to redo it every time.
Riki
*From:* Richard Kimberly Heck <rikih...@gmail.com>
*Sent:* 24 April 2025 18:21
*To:* Maria Gouskova <gousk...@gmail.com>; Carl Evans
<c.evan...@outlook.com>
*Cc:* lyx-users@lists.lyx.org <lyx-users@lists.lyx.org>
*Subject:* Re: Lyx Margins
On 4/24/25 12:28 PM, Maria Gouskova wrote:
> LaTeX would normally break up a real word according to some internal
> dictionary it has. Since you gave it a non-word that's got more
> characters than the line can accommodate, it doesn't know how to fit
> that huge word on a line or where to break it up. If you try putting
> some spaces between those "a"s, things should look more normal.
>
> When you work with actual text, you can set different margins from
> what the class default specifies in the "Page margins" area that you
> can see in your screenshot.
And let me add that the margins in LyX do not necessarily match the
margins in the generated file. LyX does not know what your ultimate
document will look like. If you export XHTML, for example, margins mean
something quite different than if you export a PDF.
Riki
--
----------------------------
Richard Kimberly (Riki) Heck
Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics
Brown University
Pronouns: they/them/their
Website:http://rkheck.frege.org/
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