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I have problems with hyphenation of negative numbers in an article document. It sometimes happens that the minus is on one line, whereas the number begins on the next line. A possible fix is to write numbers in math mode, that is with $ before and after the number. But then the minus becomes very long, which looks odd to me. Compare $-$ with a simple -. I am using amsmath and amsfonts and amssymb, which might be related to that problem. Is there any way to make the minus before numbers shorter?

ghx
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    But the 'long' minus is a minus, whereas the short text mode symbol is a hyphen. Surely math mode is the correct solution. – Ian Thompson Apr 04 '20 at 13:41
  • @IanThompson So you are saying it must look like this and this is always the case, in let's say most latex packages/frameworks? – ghx Apr 04 '20 at 13:43
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    I'm saying that a minus sign should be used to indicate negative numbers, not a hyphen. If the minus sign is too long for your tastes then it should be changed throughout the document, e.g. by using a different font. – Ian Thompson Apr 04 '20 at 13:45
  • @IanThompson ah okay thanks for the information. Do you happen to know a suitable font? – ghx Apr 04 '20 at 13:46
  • What is not used looks odd, but not necessarily is wrong. Compare both - and $-$ with the $+$ in the same line ... Which of the two look wrong as mathematical symbol? – Fran Apr 04 '20 at 13:54
  • There is a lot of information about fonts at the LaTeX font catalogue. Unfortunately, the examples don't have minus signs in them, so you will need to try some out to see which you prefer. – Ian Thompson Apr 04 '20 at 14:07
  • Another option would be to use the \num macro from the siunitx package. – luki Apr 04 '20 at 15:12
  • Thanks everyone! – ghx Apr 04 '20 at 18:34

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