Re: a question of hyphenation policy

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

>  .hlm n    Set the consecutive automatically hyphenated line limit
>            to to n.  A negative value means "no limit".

What happens after that count is reached is that the next
line is stretched wide, simply to avoid hyphenation (unless
.na is used, in which case the line is simply broken short).
To me it sounds like this "solution" is worse than the
problem.  Without an optimizing paragraph-at-a-time algorithm
like TeX has, which can retry the entire paragraph with
different breakpoints, with roff's line-at-a-time approach
only human intervention can really help.

>  \n[.hlc]  Count of immediately preceding consecutive
>            hyphenated lines in environment.
>
> My question is: should a page break reset this count?

If the register is made writable, this can be decided by the
macro package, by writing a zero to the register when a new
page is begun.