[Groff] hyphenation in words with explicit hyphen

[Werner LEMBERG]

Dear friends,


shall I modify groff so that words which contain an explicit hyphen
are hyphenated only there and not at different positions?

Example:

  current:

    sentence-ending
       ^    ^   ^
      breakpoints

   new:

    sentence-ending
            ^
       breakpoint


This behaviour is also implemented in TeX.

Maybe it makes sense to be not that rigid, e.g. I could add registers
`explicit-hyphen-distance-before' (ehdb) and
`explicit-hyphen-distance-after' (ehda) to specify the number of
characters before and after an explicit hyphen which are protected
against implicit breakpoints.  At least for German this is useful;
additionally, because groff can't optimize paragraphs, it possibly
avoids ugly gaps in compound words.

For example, setting ehdb = ehda = 3 would yield

  sentence-ending
     ^    ^

Please comment.


    Werner