prevent a bit of paragraph spilling over page turn

[cybmole]

ok, so I put widows:2; orphans:2 into the main calibre style in the book & reloaded it onto Sony T3.
That does make a difference, pages are no longer squared off & there are no single 1/2 lines stranded on a page. So Sony or ADE have changed the defaults I guess.
I think I prefer having the pages squared off, though , actually, now that I can see how to have it either way.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by cybmole

ok, so I put widows:2; orphans:2 into the main calibre style in the book & reloaded it onto Sony T3.
That does make a difference, pages are no longer squared off & there are no single 1/2 lines stranded on a page. So Sony or ADE have changed the defaults I guess.
I think I prefer having the pages squared off, though , actually, now that I can see how to have it either way.

What do you mean by "squared off"?

[cybmole]

"squared off" is a phrase I picked up from googling widows & orphans. it means having all pages appear full length i.e. NOT having some pages artificially shortened by the widows & orphans process.

so if you view the book in a 2 page at a time viewer, the 2 pages will form as a "square" - well sort-of anyway. I guess that is the derivation

[theducks]

Originally Posted by cybmole

"squared off" is a phrase I picked up from googling widows & orphans. it means having all pages appear full length i.e. NOT having some pages artificially shortened by the widows & orphans process.

so if you view the book in a 2 page at a time viewer, the 2 pages will form as a "square" - well sort-of anyway. I guess that is the derivation

I would think that effect would be near impossible in a e-book because of flow,character widths and font resizing.
I don't think I have seen that in practice. Besides, it would be most obvious when pages oppose.

Many of my OLD paperbacks did not Start a new chapter on a fresh page, just a new heading, Like Calibres viewer in Scroll mode

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by cybmole

"squared off" is a phrase I picked up from googling widows & orphans. it means having all pages appear full length i.e. NOT having some pages artificially shortened by the widows & orphans process.

so if you view the book in a 2 page at a time viewer, the 2 pages will form as a "square" - well sort-of anyway. I guess that is the derivation

Paper books often adjust the vertical spacing between lines to get the squared off look in spite of also having widows and orphans. This helps the look when both pages are displayed together side by side as they are typically done in a paper book. eBooks are normally display 1 page at a time so this is less important however it would be possible for reader software to offer this feature however, I am not aware of any software that does this. It really only makes sense for two page layout as seen in some of the larger landscape displays on tablets. Perhaps Marvin will add this. It is exactly the kind of feature the author loves to do.

Dale

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Paper books often adjust the vertical spacing between lines to get the squared off look in spite of also having widows and orphans.

Before doing that, a good typesetter (human or software) would first try stretching or squeezing the words in some lines, to make some paragraph one line longer or shorter, without altering the line spacing. It could even be done a few pages earlier.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Before doing that, a good typesetter (human or software) would first try stretching or squeezing the words in some lines, to make some paragraph one line longer or shorter, without altering the line spacing. It could even be done a few pages earlier.

yep - that's part of what you pay extra for with hardback editions.

I wonder if paperbacks get less care, or do they just reprint the hardback's typesetting on cheap stock paper ?. I suspect the former, as typically it is a smaller page size

anyway, I am now clear that
1. most retail epub books have no widows/orphans explicit CSS - (based on sampling my own library) though I have now found one that does.
2. with the sony readers, the 650 had a default of 2, but the T3 has a default of zero ( which can be overridden by CSS within the book).
3. AFAIK - no one has documented how each popular e-reader handles this

I am still dithering over which setting gives the better e-reading edxperiance

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cybmole

2. with the sony readers, the 650 had a default of 2, but the T3 has a default of zero ( which can be overridden by CSS within the book).

A default of 0 would be illegal, it's probably a default of 1.

Be careful if you decide you don't want any widows/orphans control, if you set a value of 0, it may be ignored (according to the CSS spec) and the default will be used.

3. AFAIK - no one has documented how each popular e-reader handles this

My Cybook Orizon seems to use a default of 2, and it has a fairly recent version of the Adobe renderer (similar to ADE 2, I believe).

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by cybmole

I wonder if paperbacks get less care, or do they just reprint the hardback's typesetting on cheap stock paper ?. I suspect the former, as typically it is a smaller page size

The latter is a "trade paperback" - that's one reason they're more expensive than MMPBs.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Jellby

A default of 0 would be illegal, it's probably a default of 1.

Be careful if you decide you don't want any widows/orphans control, if you set a value of 0, it may be ignored (according to the CSS spec) and the default will be used.

no control is easy as T3 will default to that all by itself!

I am only tweaking for my own use so I don't have to worry about getting all readers to show same layout. The lack of explicit CSS in most books suggests that publishers don't bother either.

so value 1 forces no controls, you reckon, value 2 corresponds to the default that ADE uses on some devices., no settings leaves it up to the reader firmware

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cybmole

so value 1 forces no controls, you reckon, value 2 corresponds to the default that ADE uses on some devices., no settings leaves it up to the reader firmware

Value 2 is the default in CSS. It should be the default in any CSS compliant reader.

Since the value specifies the minimum number of lines after/before a pagebreak, yes, a value of 1 means no controls, as any number of lines is allowed. And since this only matters when there is a pagebreak inside an element, a value of 0 makes no sense and might be ignored.

[cybmole]

OK - so what would widows: 1 orphans: 2, do
& vice versa ?

which of those is the one that will prevent the last line of a chapter having a page to itself ?

[HarryT]

A widow is a paragraph-ending line that's on its own at the top of a page. An orphan is a paragraph-starting line that's on its own at the bottom of a page. So you want a widow setting of >1.

[DiapDealer]

The widows and orphan set to "1" (off in other words) is my personal preference when reading. Encountering an unusually large margin at the bottom of a particular "page" (when w&o is set higher) invariably tricks me into thinking I'm encountering the end of a chapter or a scene-break. It doesn't trip me up too badly when a new chapter doesn't follow, but I do tend to stumble a bit while I determine if there was/wasn't a scene-break.

That's also the reason why I deem vertical-spacing alone to be insufficient for the demarcation of scene breaks in an ebook. If there's no graphic flourish, or any of the other "traditional" indicators, I prefer to see some sort of font-style or -variant (or raised cap) change to the text (after the break). Something that my eye can't possibly overlook. If all content creators did smething like that, I'd personally leave the w&o settings alone for my reading. But since that's unlikely to happen...