Your point re $min is well taken. Thanks for the explanation. I thought I needed it to deal with cases where $max came in the middle of a word, but I see now a proper regex does a better (and more generalized) job.

re the plus six: what I was actually trying to do was to allow what would otherwise have been a very short ( < 7 chars ) lastline to be rendered together (printer's sense) with a standard-length penultimate line. ie, allow

          ...(59 chars) blah fit.
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to render as

     |     ...blah  fit.   | #bars mark edge of frame
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rather than as

     |     ...blah.       |
     |     fit.           |
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but that got lost in my match_count mess.

<G>and your first line offers more food for thought, but what I need now is actual chow...

Afterthought: Should or can this node be renamed? Your answers make it clear that my (title) ref to split's behavior wasn't really the issue (and I would hate to have folk looking for info on split spending time OFF-topic).
cheers.