Widows and Orphans

[danrodney]

In Liz Castro's book she says Adobe Digital Editions and the nook support CSS widows and orphans. I've been testing it out and can't seem to get them to work. Am I doing something wrong or do they not support it?

Here's my CSS:

html, body, p {
	widows: 2 !important;
	orphans: 2 !important;
}

I added the !important in just to see if that helped but it didn't.

Just to be clear, I want to prevent the last two words in a paragraph from breaking. I don't want one word to be all by itself on a line.

In case you want to see an example .epub I've attached one below. Please note it's a test file so there may be other things I haven't cleaned up from InDesign's ePub export. But I don't think they should affect things. Just didn't want you to think this is finished quality

Thanks in advanced for any help.
Dan

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by danrodney

Just to be clear, I want to prevent the last two words in a paragraph from breaking. I don't want one word to be all by itself on a line.

These refer to the number of lines that can hang at the start or end of a page (a screen's worth of text). So I think you may want 1 rather than 2, and 1 is probably the default. Most of the posts I have seen are on turning them off (set to 0) and this seems to work.

[JSWolf]

If I am not mistaken, I think 2 is the default for widows and orphans.

In ADE, widows and orphans do work. I set them to 0.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If I am not mistaken, I think 2 is the default for widows and orphans

Yes, 2 is what HTML Dog lists as the default.

[elemenoP]

There are two different meanings of "orphan":

* A paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page/column.
* A word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Orphans result in too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page.

You are wanting to control the second meaning (words in a line) but it looks like the css orphan property controls the first meaning (lines of a paragraph at the bottom of the page). I don't know if there is a css property for minimum words in a line.

eP

[WillAdams]

You can control the latter by using no-break spans and non-breaking spaces (subject to the H&J algorithm used) on the last two words in all paragraphs.

William

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by elemenoP

There are two different meanings of "orphan":

* A paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page/column.
* A word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Orphans result in too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page.

You are wanting to control the second meaning (words in a line) but it looks like the css orphan property controls the first meaning (lines of a paragraph at the bottom of the page). I don't know if there is a css property for minimum words in a line.

eP

I've never come across your second use of the word "orphan" before. It's always meant the first definition to me.

[elemenoP]

That's from the Chicago Manual of Style (c&p from Wikipedia). What do you call a too-short last line in a paragraph?

eP

[HarryT]

It's honestly never crossed my mind that it had a name . To tell you the truth I don't see any particular issue with a paragraph ending in a line containing a single word.

[elemenoP]

well in pbook publishing it's "not allowed." Another old typesetting rule.

When I first started reading on my Sony, I was surprised to see that it adjusted pages for widows and orphans. I could see other people thinking "how come some pages are longer than others?" And to see that people like to adjust their own widow and orphan settings to 0 bears this out.

eP

[danrodney]

Now that I read more about them on HTML Dog, I realize I thought orphans did something different. I thought they were controlling the number of words on a line, not the number of lines on a "page." To me an orphan is a word on it's own line. I guess I'll have to look into another option. Too bad CSS doesn't have a specific setting to handle them

Like elemenoP said, orphans are not allowed in traditional typesetting. It's a sign of bad typography, unless columns are very narrow.

Thanks again,
Dan