You can also increase the tracking so that the paragraph takes up additional lines. If a paragraph looks like the one in Figure 5, with only one (or a few) words hanging off the end, it is a good candidate to have its tracking tightened, so as to save a line of text:įigure 5: an unaltered paragraph, with the tracking set at zero.įigure 6: the same paragraph with its tracking at -10, saving a line of text.įigure 7: the same paragraph with its tracking tightened to -50.įigure 7 shows the problem with tightening tracking: you can easily make text illegible. If I have a widow at the end of a page (or an orphan at the start of the next one), then what you need to do is change how many lines a different paragraph, one before the problem paragraph, takes up. However, if you’re the lowly designer (or don’t want to change the text), you can do it with “tracking,” which is the space between letters and words.
One is to, if you are the editor or author of a piece, take out words or rephrase sentences in such a way that paragraphs are of different lengths and solve the problems. There are two main ways, that I know of, to control widows and orphans. Start at the beginning of the book and work your way forward, scanning the bottoms and tops of each page for widows and orphans. To my knowledge, you have to do this manually. Fine for a printout, but not appropriate for a book, where lining up the last lines of text on every page is a task in itself. Why can’t you do that in InDesign? Because the way that Word or whatever solves the problem is by simply changing how many lines of text will be on the page.
How to turn off widows and orphans in word 2010 how to#
So… how to fix widows and orphans? In a word processor, you can just turn on “widows and orphans” and the program automatically re-flows the text to solve the problem.
(or 800 pages, in the case of the proudhon reader these images are from). Which isn’t so bad on a zine or something, but gets really, really annoying on a 300+ page book. Otherwise, you’ll have to do it all over again. After all the other layout decisions have been made and approved by everyone involved, after the text is finalized (but for a last proof-read, of course).
But in my book work, a single-word orphan is only considered a problem if it is shorter than the indent on the next line.Īnyhow, the deal with widow and orphan control is that it comes last. This is considered an error in some publishing, and not others: when I worked with the Earth First Journal, we had all kinds of other text constraints. (note that the figure above also shows a second kind of orphan: a single word on its own at the end of a paragraph. There’s no way to complete automate the process of widow and orphan control. You’ll actually find them a lot in mass-market paperbacks, once you develop an eye for it, but that’s because they’re poorly (or at least hastily) designed. Widows and orphans are considered errors in print design because it interrupts the flow of reading. It’s a single line of a paragraph before a page break (or a column break). This orphan is worse because it’s the only line of text before a large break and a new heading. This is considered an error.įigure 2: a terrible, wicked, evil orphan. What are widows and orphans? The image at the top shows an “orphan.” (From my work on Property Is Theft, coming out soon from AK Press.) The line “tools of production… through co-operative association?” is isolated from its parent paragraph, which happens to be on the previous page. Finicky enough on a normal book, but downright fun when you’ve got footnotes as well. Widow and orphan control! One of the more time-consuming elements of book design.
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