... man\-u\-script ...
Here, each of the \
-
commands is converted to a hyphenated break,
if (and only if) necessary.
\hyphenation{man-u-script}
and the hyphenation would be set for the whole document. Barbara Beeton publishes articles containing lists of these “hyphenation exceptions”, in TUGboat; the hyphenation ‘man-u-script’ comes from one of those articles.
What if you have more than one language in your document? Simple: select the appropriate language, and do the same as above:\usepackage[french]{babel} \selectlanguage{french} \hyphenation{re-cher-cher}
(nothing clever here: this is the “correct” hyphenation of the word,
in the current tables). However, there’s a problem here: just as
words with accents in them won’t break, so \
hyphenation
commands
with accents in them produce an error:
\usepackage[french]{babel} \selectlanguage{french} \hyphenation{r\'e-f\'e-rence}
tells us that the hyphenation is “improper”, and that it will be “flushed”.
But, just as hyphenation of words is enabled by selecting an 8-bit
font encoding, so \
hyphenation
commands are rendered proper again
by selecting that same 8-bit font encoding. For the hyphenation
patterns provided in the usual distributions, the encoding is
Cork, so the complete sequence is:
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[french]{babel} \selectlanguage{french} \hyphenation{r\'e-f\'e-rence}
The same sort of performance goes for any language for which 8-bit fonts and corresponding hyphenation patterns are available. Since you have to select both the language and the font encoding to have your document typeset correctly, it should not be a great imposition to do the selections before setting up hyphenation exceptions.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=hyphexcept