Orphans/widows
By wildgeese177
@wildgeese177 (30)
United States
June 27, 2007 5:58pm CST
OK, you're looking at the layout just back from the design team.
One paragraph is five lines long, but the last line has only three letters in it, perhaps even a partial word that's been hyphenated from the line above.
In my book that's not only a bad break, but ugly as heck.
I thought I'd get the thoughts of the other editors here. What do each of your magazines consider an orphan/widow, or do you just ignore them (like today's newspapers).
2 people like this
2 responses
@sreevasu (2717)
• India
18 Jul 07
It depends. Providing a little indent to the first line of the paragraph, orphan/widow doesn't make any harm in reading. But if no indent is given it would be better to tighten the text avoiding orphans/widows.
killahclaire's example is worth to note.
Thank you for asking.
@wildgeese177 (30)
• United States
19 Jul 07
That's interesting.
I always thought it was clunky.....thanks.
@scarywhitegirl (2766)
• United States
28 Jun 07
In my current position, I'm not the one in charge of final layout, so I don't even look to see how the lines fall on the page. I know that they will be changed before the document goes out, so I just have to hope that the woman who does the final layout (who has worked for a newspaper) is conscious of these things.
At my previous job, where we did deal with the final layout for books, my boss was a real stickler about widows and orphans. We would check all of the word divisions as well as for ugly lines at the end of paragraphs. We weren't always able to convince the press that our changes were critical, but we always tried!
@wildgeese177 (30)
• United States
29 Jun 07
Well, I'm deal with column jumps with a hyphen, some sort of odd two-letter hyphenation that the new graphics program seems to like because it's "readable," according to it, and everything else.
Trying to get the next issue out the door 10 days early tomorrow afternoon.....so you know too well have "stressed" I am right now.
