Force pdflatex to create one box per word.

Question

Good evening everyone!

I'm converting ebook files to ereader-optimized pdf files (the sony ereader can't propertly justify text). I'm therefore converting html to latex, and then building the latex output using pdflatex.

The sony reader has a function to lookup words in a dictionary. However, it figures out words by analysing boxes; and pdflatex generates one box per line. I subsequently have lost the possibility to use the dictionary search.

So here's my question: How do I tell pdflatex to put each word in a separate box?

Thanks!

EDIT:
I’m trying to tweak the output of the pdflatex command to make it produce one box per word. Consider this example:

\documentclass{minimal}

\begin{document}
    This is an example sentence.
\end{document}

When opened in a PDF editor after compilation, this sample will appear as one text box containing the sentence "This is an example sentence.". This is fine for most full-featured pdf readers. Yet on my sony e-reader, selection of words is based on boxes ; therefore my pdf reader will select the full sentence, hence failing to find a definition for the word I clicked.

I noticed that pdflatex stops at punctuation marks. How can I proceed to make it create one box per word? In the output, I would then have one box for "This", one for "is", one for "an", and so on.

Answer 1

Set the hyphenation penalty to 10000 (effective infinity)

\hyphenpenalty=10000

and perhaps increase the typesetting tolerance

\tolerance=1000

See http://dcwww.camd.dtu.dk/~schiotz/comp/LatexTips/LatexTips.html#nohyphen.

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In case you don't know this, TeX makes layout decisions by assigning penalties to bad stuff (too much or too little white space (horizontal or vertical), widow or orphan lines, over- or under-full boxes, splitting footnotes across pages, and so on ad naseum), then tries to minimize the per-page penalty.

You can diddle the kinds of choices it makes quite extensively by adjusting the penalty values. Any arrangement which scores 10000 is absolutely forbidden, and I guess that if there is no arrangement which scores less the run stops.

Answer 2

I'm guessing your trouble is not with boxes, but with your font encoding. Try putting the following just after your \documentclass{minimal}:

\usepackage{cmap} % Puts extra info in the PDF's font dictionary that helps searching
\usepackage{lmodern} % cmr, the default Tex font, has a whacky font layout
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % This and next line are recommended with lmodern
\usepackage{textcomp}