Widows and Orphans

[Waylander]

This might be the wrong place for this post, but I'm having issues with widows and orphans on my Clara HD. I followed the steps to remove widows and orphans when converting books to epub. However, some still have inconsistent bottom margins even after this process. I downloaded The Wheel of Osheim and by Mark Lawrence and The Silver Tide by Jen Williams from Amazon. Different publishers, both AZW3, and still had inconsistent bottom margins after conversion to epub following the widows and orphans process. Is there anything else I can do?

[davidfor]

What are you doing to remove the widows and orphan? As Kobo uses the default value of 2 for these, you want to set these to 1. I normally put it in the body class, but, sometimes leave it in the class used for the body text.

And even when you have it set to this, the space at the bottom depends on what is on the page. If it is all just text with the same class, and hence the same size and spacing, the space at the bottom will be consistent. And it will be room for less than one line.

But, on pages with other elements on it, such as a chapter heading or a scene break, then the amount of space at the bottom will be different. It should still be less than the space required for one line, but, the exact size will be different from the plain text pages.

Beyond those comments, we would need to see some examples. The book code and screenshots should help to tell what is happening.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Waylander

I followed the steps to remove widows and orphans when converting books to epub.

Widows and orphans are starts and ends of a paragraph on a different page. Having no empty space at the bottom of the screen actually creates widows and orphans, which can interrupt the flow of reading/understanding more than the space can. Obviously on say a 2" to 5" screen you might want paragraphs to avoid extra space and create widows and orphans. On a 6.8" or larger screen, or 6" 300 dpi with small text you'd want to avoid widows and orphans by having a varying amount of space at the bottom of the page.

[stumped]

Good point. Remove widows and orphans is the opposite of "make all screens have the same number of text lines". The setting for achieving the latter is "allow widows and orphans"? Unless I have double negatived myself into a confused mess (which is a possibility )

I set W and O values to 1 in css ( having been lectured about not setting them to zero) and all my pages render full length. Is that = removing them?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by stumped

Good point. Remove widows and orphans is the opposite of "make all screens have the same number of text lines". The setting for achieving the latter is "allow widows and orphans"? Unless I have double negatived myself into a confused mess (which is a possibility )

I set W and O values to 1 in css ( having been lectured about not setting them to zero) and all my pages render full length. Is that = removing them?

Setting widows and orphans to 1 is the logical equivalent of removing them. If there are no widows/orphans defined, RMSDK defaults to 2. To keep things simpler, I set this in the body css instead of having it in multiple locations. However this will not guarantee the same number of text lines on each page since chapter headings, section breaks, spacing between paragraphs can all cause a gap at the bottom of a page where a line will not fit.

I prefer that possible gap to having a page that is solid text with no extra spacing between elements.

[Quoth]

No, it's the opposite. If a paragraph runs across a page break then the smaller bit before or smaller bit after so page is filled is the Widow or Orphan. I forget which is which. Intuitively I'd imagine a line (or two) finishing a paragraph but on the top of the next page is an Orphan and a line (or two) alone that's the start of a paragraph on the bottom of a page is the Widow. But I may have them back to front.

I think a setting of one basically means a paragraph doesn't jump to the next page if otherwise a Widow or Orphan is created. I can't see how 0 has a meaning. But I could be wrong.

If you have to page back to re-read a paragraph in entirety to understand it, it MIGHT be there is a widowed or orphaned line (or two, or three), or it might mean it's badly written or you were distracted. Obviously it's easier to cope with a split paragraph were neither the orphan or widow is less than four lines. Or three.

[stumped]

I recall that the default value of 2 did cause some pages to be shorter than others, which always tricks my mind into expecting a chapter end.
So I took to setting them to zero.
Then someone here said that zero is an invalid setting and different renderers may treat that differently as it's technically an error.
So now I set both to 1.
I have that as a bit of extra css for calibre to add in for me. And it seems to work ok. Doing it manually for every book would be tedious.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by stumped

So now I set both to 1.
I have that as a bit of extra css for calibre to add in for me. And it seems to work ok. Doing it manually for every book would be tedious.

I do the same. (Actually I have a couple of other extra css rules besides w/o, disabling hyphenation for example).

[JSWolf]

One of the patches turns off or sets Widow and orphans to 1.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Quoth

No, it's the opposite. If a paragraph runs across a page break then the smaller bit before or smaller bit after so page is filled is the Widow or Orphan. I forget which is which.

Widows are at the end (bottom of page), orphans are at the beginning (top of page).

Originally Posted by Quoth

I think a setting of one basically means a paragraph doesn't jump to the next page if otherwise a Widow or Orphan is created. I can't see how 0 has a meaning. But I could be wrong.

Widows and orphans set the minimum number of lines that will appear at the top or bottom of a page. 1 says 1 line, 2 is a minimum of two lines, etc. And 0 is indeed undefined since widows and orphans are specified as positive integers though most renderers treat it as 1.

For those reading epubs, there is a patch for librmsdk.so.1.0.0 in the kobopatcher collection ( Disable orphans/widows avoidance: yes ) that disables widows/orphans (effectively forces to 1).

[Quoth]

I was vague deliberately!

There is some disagreement about the definitions of widow and orphan; what one source calls a widow another calls an orphan.

Except the bottom of the page is the START of a paragraph and the top of the next page has the END of the same paragraph.
Overall though it's a poor article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

Now I'm going to have to experiment!

It's worse with paper as you may want to insert blank pages.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Widows are at the end (bottom of page), orphans are at the beginning (top of page).



Widows and orphans set the minimum number of lines that will appear at the top or bottom of a page. 1 says 1 line, 2 is a minimum of two lines, etc. And 0 is indeed undefined since widows and orphans are specified as positive integers though most renderers treat it as 1.

For those reading epubs, there is a patch for librmsdk.so.1.0.0 in the kobopatcher collection ( Disable orphans/widows avoidance: yes ) that disables widows/orphans (effectively forces to 1).

Widows and orphans set to 0 does work with RMSDK. I've used it before switching to 1.

I've seen widows and orphans set to 2 in the CSS. When I edit an ePub, I alsoways set windows and orphans to 1 in <body>

body {
  widows: 1;
  orphans: 1;
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-right: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  margin-left: 0;
  text-align: justify;
}

In a printed book, you can fudge things so the page does not have such a gap at the bottom. But with a Reader, you can't do that and it doesn't look good. It does look much better without widows and orphans when most pages end in the same place.

[RobertJSawyer]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Having no empty space at the bottom of the screen actually creates widows and orphans, which can interrupt the flow of reading/understanding more than the space can.

An opinion, but hardly the only one. In books that use blank lines with no typographic ornaments to indicate scene or section changes (and that is a great number of books), leaving blank space at the bottom of the screen confusingly makes it look like the current scene has ended ... only to find that it continues on the next screen and THAT can interrupt the flow of reading/understanding.

Widow/orphan control is a typographic nicety created for printed books which typically show many more lines per page than do six-inch E Ink devices, when used with default settings.

[Quoth]

Certainly true with 167 dpi 6" or 800 x 600 screen ereaders. Not so valid with 300 dpi 7" ereaders and a small font.

[ps67]

My personal taste is that widows and orphans are bad in pBook but I want to avoid white space at the bottom of the screen in my Kobo (and also in my Kindle).
So: widows: 1; orphans: 1;