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Old 07-14-2014, 04:08 PM   #101
GeoffR
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Quote:
Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man View Post
Does this seriously bother people that much? Am I really the only person who doesn't fret about uneven white space -- or even the infamous long-paragraph bug -- and simply enjoys my book?
The uneven layout that results from using the default values of widows:2;orphans:2; does greatly detract from my reading experience, as much as spelling mistakes or missing scene breaks.

Luckily it is trivial to fix the problem by changing the defaults in the book's stylesheet.

Edit: I thought about different ways the widows/orphans rules could be implemented, ways that don't result in blank lines being added to the bottom of the page: One is to increase the spacing between words to make the offending paragraph longer, eliminating the widow. Another is to increase the page's line spacing, and so evenly spreading out the blank lines over the whole page. I think the latter is the best way to do it if it had to be done, but still worse than just leaving the orphan/widow in place.

Last edited by GeoffR; 07-14-2014 at 04:45 PM. Reason: ... some other ways to implement widows/orphans ...
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