Quote:
Originally Posted by catsknit
Thanks, I guess I was asking which patches and hacks are most useful for someone with little experience in adding/changing things. When I use Calibre to convert books to epub, for example, I pretty much leave all the default values b/c I understand very little of it.
Some of the things listed in the patches you've named above are completely foreign to me, and others are confusing. For example, why would you want to disable the orphans/widows avoidance? What advantage is there to doing that?
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For printed material, controlling widowsand orphans is somewhat useful to prevent a paragraph being split over multiple pages where a single line might be at the bottom of one page (orphan) and the rest of the paragraph on the next page or most of the paragraph on one page and a single line at the top of the next page (widow). The software I last used for generating printed pages would automagically add a little extra space between lines (leading/feathering) to make the page take the same vertical space when widows/orphans were moved. For ereaders, this is not really necessary. The default for widows and orphans is 2 lines so if you have a 3 line paragraph with two lines at the bottom of the page, it would be forced to the next page leaving a wide blank area at the bottom of the current page. My normal procedure is to set both widows and orphans in the CSS (stylesheet portion of the epub file) to 1 so a single line can be left at either the bottom or top of a page. The patch basically removes the widows/orphans functionality and has the same effect as adding widows: 1; and orphans: 1; to the CSS without actually needing to do so for every ebook.
See the Wikipedia entry
Widows and Orphans for a more information.