Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
Wouldn't "off" for widows and orphans mean that paragraphs never go over the end of the page? (And I'm ignoring paragraphs longer than a page.) "1" means there can be a widowed, or an orphaned line.
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For widows and orphans, off and 1 mean the same. You can have a single line at the start or end of a page (it's rather hard to have less than one line left on a page
). Larger integers used for widows and orphans set the minimum number of lines at the start or end of a page. Setting both to 3 for example would force a paragraph with two lines at the bottom of a page to be moved to the next page while a paragraph with 4 lines at the bottom of the page and two lines on the next page would be forced to a 3/3 line split. Both of these leave those "lovely" white spaces at the bottom of the page.
I just edited one purchase where the author set widows to 4 and orphans to 3. Makes you wonder if he ever looked at the book on a device or app where widows and orphans were honoured.