orphan lines

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Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Date: 2001-04-24 16:12:59 PST

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic=1&th=1ab1f8e41e86c2b2,4&seekm=3AE5E8CA.ABAEDDDD%40adsdesign.analog.com#p

> Greetings. I need a way to
> get rid of orphan lines in Latex.
> A line is said to be an orphan line [...]

No. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph on the last line of a page. The last line of the paragraph on a new page is a widow.

To get rid of an orphan, preceded the paragraph with \clearpage.

To get rid of a widow is harder. If the paragraph is long, try following the last word with \looseness=-1. If not, run the page a little shorter with \enlargethispage{-\baselineskip}. In fact you can run the page longer too, and make a two-line widow which some publishers will accept.

To do it automatically is harder still because a machine cannot make sensible aesthetic judgments. You can fiddle with the penalties between paragraphs, but usually pagebreaks are best done manually on the few occasions when they are needed.

Peter

orphan lines

>Won't setting \widowpenalty to a sensible value do the trick?

not necessarily. \widowpenalty (and the oddly-named \clubpenalty, which corresponds to the english term "orphan") can only have effect if there is flexibility in the size of pages: there's no feedback from the page maker to the paragraph builder, so that \looseness can't be automatically adjusted. vertical lists almost never have significant stretchability so the penalties will only actually work if there is flexibility in the page height, unless you get lucky.

so \widowpenalty (and \clubpenalty) > default value of 150 is an acceptable solution only if \raggedbottom is in effect.

Robin Fairbairns