problem with hl.mergeContinuous

[Yoni Amir]

I am using a configuration roughly as follows (with solr 4 beta):

       <bool name="hl.usePhraseHighlighter">true</bool>
       <bool name="hl.highlightMultiTerm">true</bool>
       <int name="hl.snippets">4</int>
       <bool name="hl.mergeContiguous">true</bool>

The fragment/snippet size is 100 by default. I found a strange case as follows:

The word that I search for appears in a field somewhere between the 300th and 
400th characters. Solr, instead of returning a snippet of 100 characters, 
returns 400 characters, from the beginning of the text and up to the word that 
is highlighted and a bit further on the text. This happens even though in the 
first 300 characters there is no hit.

I found out that the length of the snippet (400) is proportional to the number 
of snippets (in this case, 100 times 4).
This is a problem because I want to show the user only around 250~ characters.

Is it a bug? Is it configurable?

Thanks,
Yoni