Line breaking

The first thing LaTeX does when processing ordinary text is to translate your input file into a sequence of glyphs and spaces. To produce a printed document, this sequence must be broken into lines (and these lines must be broken into pages).

LaTeX usually does the line (and page) breaking in the text body for you but in some environments you manually force line breaks.

A common workflow is to get a final version of the document content before taking a final pass through and considering line breaks (and page breaks). This differs from word processing, where you are formatting text as you input it. Putting these off until the end prevents a lot of fiddling with breaks that will change anyway.

• \\		Start a new line.
• \obeycr & \restorecr		Make each input line start a new output line.
• \newline		Break the line
• \- (hyphenation)		Insert explicit hyphenation.
• \discretionary		Explicit control of the hyphen character.
• \fussy & \sloppy		Be more or less particular with line breaking.
• \hyphenation		Tell LaTeX how to hyphenate a word.
• \linebreak & \nolinebreak		Forcing & avoiding line breaks.