>> I think many publishers (including the ones I work for) do not like >> leaving two letters of a word before or after a break. > > I stand admonished. In German, it appears quite natural to split > off two-letter pre- and suffixes, and the English hyphenation rules > often allow it as well.
If the line length is sufficiently large, I restrict the hyphenation to three letters before and after a hyphenation. However, if the columns get small, having hyphenation after two characters is *always* preferable to large whitespace gaps. Werner