2.4.3 Avoid more than three consecutive hyphenated lines

This guideline can be achieved easily when hyphenating manually. See §2.4.1 for more information on manual hypenation.

The Future

Hyphenation will be included in the CSS 3 Text module, but at the time of writing, the definition of the hyphenation feature is still very much up-in-the-air. Currently the CSS 3 Paged Media module has more details of the hyphenation properties originally proposed, and among these is the hyphenate-lines property which specifies the maximum number of successive hyphenated lines in an element. For example:

p {
  hyphenate: auto;
  hyphenate-lines: 3;
}

A value of none means that there is no limit to the number of successive hyphenated lines.

Rhythm & Proportion

§ Etiquette of Hyphenation & Pagination

Reference

Cover of ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’ by Robert Bringhurst

Cover of ‘Web Typography’ by Richard Rutter