Of course troff hyphenates. Its job in the pipeline is to hyphenate, compute layouts, and output input for dpost. If your argument is that decoupling hyphenatio

Of course troff hyphenates. Its job in the pipeline is to hyphenate, compute layouts, and output input for dpost. If your argument is that decoupling hyphenation from layout is difficult, I believe you are wrong. Splitting the hyphenator into a separate program is straightforward enough. Consider the text formatter hyphen < input | layout | topostscript where hyphen inserts all possible hyphens, and layout discards those which are unnecessary.