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widow and orphan controlYour call
Picture a paragraph that starts at the bottom of one page and continues at the top of the next. When only the last line of the paragraph appears at the top of the second page, that line is called a widow. When only the first line of the paragraph appears at the bottom of the first page, that line is called an orphan.
Widow and orphan control prevents both. Orphans are moved to the next page with the rest of the paragraph. To cure widows, lines are moved from the bottom of one page to the top of the next. It’s a little more complicated than it sounds, because curing a widow cannot create a new orphan, nor vice versa.
Be aware that if you use widow and orphan control, you will frequently see blank lines at the bottom of your pages. This is normal, since lines must be transplanted to cure the problem.
Widow and orphan control in a word processor is all-or-nothing. You can’t control widows and orphans separately, even though widows are more distracting. Why? Orphans appear at the beginning of a paragraph, so they’re at least a full line. But widows can be any length, even a single word, because they appear at the end of a paragraph.
Do you need widow and orphan control? Try it. See how it looks. In my own work, I approach widow and orphan control the same way I approach ligatures—I only use it if widows and orphans are causing a visible problem. Otherwise, I find that the blank lines at the bottom of the page are more annoying than the widows and orphans.
How to turn on widow & orphan control
WordRight-click in the text and select Paragraph → Line and Page Breaks → check Widow / Orphan control
PagesView → Show Toolbar (or option + ⌘ + t) → Format button → More pane → check Prevent widow & orphan lines
CSSNot applicable
by the way
You can also cure isolated widows and orphans with some judicious editing. But don’t use a hard line break or carriage return.
Widows & orphans aren’t typically an issue on the web, because web content doesn’t naturally span multiple pages. Browsers, however, are happy to put a small word alone on the last line of a paragraph, which always looks bad. You can fix this with a nonbreaking space and a little clever programming.
Here in the 21st century, the widow and orphan terminology lands on the questionable side of quaint. I favor coining a new term for this typographic condition. One word should suffice—it’s the same problem, just at different edges of the page. Maybe stragglers and thus straggler control? Nominations welcome.
A widowed line: the last line of a paragraph, all alone on the other side of a page break.
At the end of the first paragraph, the word "lorem" is an orphan in the second sense: a very short final line that, because the rest of its line is white, creates an impression of two lines of whitespace between the paragraphs.
In typesetting, widows and orphans are lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph that are left dangling at the top or bottom of a page or column, separated from the rest of the paragraph. (The typographer's terms for the top and bottom of a page or column are head and foot.)
Definitions[edit]
There is some disagreement about the definitions of widows and orphans; what one source calls a widow another calls an orphan.[1][full citation needed][2][3] The Chicago Manual of Style provides these definitions:[3][dead link]
WidowA paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page or column, thus separated from the rest of the text. Mnemonically, a widow is "alone at the top" (of the family tree but, in this case, of the page).OrphanA paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page or column, thus separated from the rest of the text. Mnemonically, an orphan is "alone at the bottom" (of the family tree but, in this case, of the page).Alternately, a word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Mnemonically still "alone at the bottom", just this time at the bottom of a paragraph. Orphans of this type give the impression of too much white space between paragraphs.
Guidelines[edit]
About the appearance of a page of text, The Chicago Manual of Style indicates that a manuscript should have no orphans or widows, even if their elimination leaves additional blank space at the bottom of the column or the page.[4] In the 16th edition, The Chicago Manual of Style (2011) suggests a new convention to determine which pages may end with the first line of a new paragraph.[5]
The techniques for eliminating widows include:
- Forcing a page break early, producing a shorter page;
- Adjusting the leading, the space between lines of text;
- Adjusting the spacing between words to produce tighter or looser paragraphs;
- Adjusting the hyphenation within the paragraph;
- Adjusting the margins of the page;
- Subtle scaling of the page without distorting the letters;
- Rewriting a portion of the paragraph;
- Reduce the letter-spacing (tracking) of the words;
- Adding a pull quote to the text (usual in magazines); and
- Adding a floating block (figure) to the text, or resizing an existing figure.
An orphan is more easily deleted, either by inserting a blank line or by forcing a page break to push the orphan line onto the next page, to be part of the paragraph to which the orphan belongs. Similarly, an orphan word at the end of a paragraph can be relocated by forcing one or more words from the preceding text line into the paragraph line of the orphan. In web-publishing, this is typically accomplished by concatenating the words in question with a non-breaking space and, if available, by utilizing the orphans: and widows: attributes in Cascading Style Sheets. Sometimes it can also be useful to add non-breaking spaces to the first two (or few) short words of a paragraph to avoid having a single orphaned word placed to the left or right of a picture or table, while the remainder of the text (with longer words) would only appear after the table.
Most full-feature word processors and page layout applications include an automatic paragraph setting that prevents widows and orphans; thus, an orphan is forced to the top of the next page or column; and the text line preceding a widow is forced to the next page or column. In technical writing, where a single source may be published in different formats, with the viewer's expectation of viewing content in different sizes and resolutions, the paragraph settings automatically prevent widows and orphans. Manual overrides, such as inserted empty lines or extra spaces, can cause the insertion of a white space into the middle of pages.
References[edit]
- ^ Carter, Rob. A widowed line, highlighted in yellow.
- ^ Day, Ben. Meggs, Philip. Typographic Design: Form and Communication. 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons: 1993. p. 263.
- ^ a b The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th ed., University of Chicago Press. Archived 2016-05-31 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., 2003, University of Chicago Press. 3.11 Overall appearance: "A page should not begin with the last line of a paragraph unless it is full measure and should not end with the first line of a new paragraph."
- ^ The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., 2011, University of Chicago Press. 2.113: "A page should not begin with the last line of a paragraph unless it is full measure. (A page can, however, end with the first line of a new paragraph.)"