UK TeX FAQ -- question label hyphenaccents

### Accented words aren’t hyphenated

TeX’s algorithm for hyphenation gives up when it encounters an `\``accent` command; there are good reasons for this, but it means that quality typesetting in non-English languages can be difficult.

For TeX macro packages, you can avoiding the effect by using an appropriately encoded font (for example, a Cork-encoded font — see the EC fonts) which contains accented letters as single glyphs. LaTeX users can achieve this end simply by adding the command

      \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

to the preamble of their document. Other encodings (notably LY1, once promoted by Y&Y inc) may be used in place of T1. Indeed, most current 8-bit TeX font encodings will ‘work’ with the relevant sets of hyphenation patterns.

One might hope that, with the many aspirant successors to TeX such as Omega, LuaTeX and ExTeX, all of which base their operations on Unicode, that the whole basis of encodings will change.

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=hyphenaccents