a question of hyphenation policy

[G. Branden Robinson]

I need guidance from real typographers.

GNU troff has long borne the following feature.

groff(7):
     .hlm       Set the consecutive automatically hyphenated line limit
                to -1 (the default), meaning “no limit”.
     .hlm n     Set the consecutive automatically hyphenated line limit
                to to n.  A negative value means “no limit”.

     \n[.hlc]       Count of immediately preceding consecutive
                    hyphenated lines in environment.
     \n[.hlm]       Maximum quantity of consecutive hyphenated lines
                    allowed in environment.

I presume that this is configurable because it becomes uncomfortable for
the reader to see a river of hyphens at the right margin.

My question is: should a page break reset this count?

$ cat EXPERIMENTS/hlc-check.groff
.na
.ll 25n
.pl 1v
antidisestablishmentarianism
.tm .hlc=\n[.hlc]

$ nroff EXPERIMENTS/hlc-check.groff
.hlc=1
antidisestablishmentari‐
anism

Regards,
Branden

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