Monday, June 26, 2017

nomenclature - Hyphenation of chemical names


When a word has to be split broken into multiple lines, it is almost always hyphenated. Chemical names can be considered words, or at least they consist of words. So the hyphenation should apply to them as well. However, hyphens often are integral parts of systematic chemical names. Therefore confusion might arise, whether such a hyphen emerged from hyphenation or if it is "mandatory". Are there any official rules for the (possible) hyphenation of the chemical names? I could not find any, yet. I am sure some journals could have it mentioned in their style manuals, but I am primarily interested whether this topic is mentioned by IUPAC.


In fact, I am undecided whether to represent inserted optional breaks in long chemical names (that have to fit into some fixed-width infobox) HTML(5) representation as ­ or , which however means hyphenation, and non-hyphenation, respectively.



Answer



IUPAC project 2014-003-2-800 addresses this issue. However there seems to be no officially released recommendation to date.


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