Widows and orphans

[woody649]

I used WordPerfect for years. I'm sure it has a control for tracking, but I very much doubt that it's automatic. To control widows and orphans, it can't be. I can do a global change in Word, just by editing the font character spacing parameter in the 'Normal" or "Body" style -- but then the entire document will get the adjusted tracking, and that could easily create other widows and/or orphans.

To use tracking to fix widows and orphans, it has to be applied selectively and locally.

[Andrew B.]

See attached screen shot. I think this feature has been there since the DOS version. The question is how well it works since programming was taken over by Corel.

[woody649]

Originally Posted by Andrew B.

See attached screen shot. I think this feature has been there since the DOS version. The question is how well it works since programming was taken over by Corel.

That's widow and orphan control, not tracking. Sure, Word has that. That's exactly what generated my question.

When you turn on widow and orphan control, the program won't allow a single line of a new paragraph to occur at the bottom of a page, or the last line of a paragraph to appear at the top of a page. To accomplish this, the program automatically moves one line to the next page. The problem is that you then have unequal numbers of lines on the pages. If they are odd-even, so they fall on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, most people won't notice. If they are even-odd, the mis-match occurs on facing pages and the overall block of text on each page doesn't match. In professional book design, that's frowned upon.

Read the article I linked to above. It explains how to address the issue using tracking. That was an eye-opener for me. I had tried to address it using leading (line spacing), but when you do that then the lines don't align on facing pages -- and in professional book design, lines are supposed to align from one page to the next.

I suspect the advent of do-it-yourself, print-on-demand publishing has resulted in a lot of books produced by authors on their home computers that violate multiple rules (or rules of thumb) of professional book design. This is an example. A professional book designer will go through a book page by page and line by line and make minute adjustments to avoid things like mis-matched lines, widows and orphans, "runts," and "rivers." I have known about widows and orphans, but in the past I have just used the automated widow and orphan protection feature in Word and ignore the extra white space that occasionally creates on the bottom of some pages. Now that I'm getting more serious about this, I'm trying to up my game a bit so that my next book (if there ever is one) will look a bit more polished and professional.

[Steve Rindsberg]

>> I suspect the advent of do-it-yourself, print-on-demand publishing has resulted in a lot of books produced by authors on their home computers that violate multiple rules (or rules of thumb) of professional book design.

Count on it!

Back in the early days of DTP, an ad exec at one of the large local agencies asked me to do the newsletter for one of his clients as a test. His art directors put me through hell, nitpicking every little thing to death before they finally (reluctantly) signed off on it. Basically, they felt I was invading their domain, I suppose.

Never heard another thing about it, got no more work out of it, but much later got a bunch of their stuff to photograph as slides, things they'd won awards for. Amongst 'em? Two issues of this newsletter; they were bragging about how they'd done it on the desktop.

The one they'd bludgeoned me over looked good (with much of the credit to the nitpicking ADs, I'll freely admit). The other, the one they'd produced themselves in-house? Utter crap. In every way.

DIY can be the ruin of professional standards, I suppose.

[Bo Aakerstrom]

Some clients can ruin thing all by themselves.

Long time ago I was dealing with a potential client who in the end decided to go with someone who according to their own business card was a "Gragic Designer". With predictable results I might add...

[Steve Rindsberg]

A real gragedy, that.