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Originally Posted by AuthorGreg
Yeah, I just eliminated widows and orphans from the print book, and it didn't look good. I'm trying to figure out how the pros keep the lines even on opposite pages while keeping widows and orphans at bay. They must shrink and expand the font or line height in minute amounts to compensate.
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There are a number of tricks. First of all, paragraph breaking in real typesetting systems is not the simple-minded "fill the line until there's no more space left" method, but it takes into account the whole paragraph and chooses the breakpoints that (ideally) make the whitespace more even. This allows forcing a paragraph to have one more or one less line than it wants (and you could do that with a paragraph a few pages before the problem). Then stretching or shrinking the letters themselves by tiny, usually unnoticeable amounts helps in getting the paragraphs look right. Real picky people even rewrite some passage to get a better pagebreak (this works if you are writing e.g. a thesis, not so useful when you are typesetting someone else's words).