![]() (The latest edition of Gregg, locking the barn door after the horse is gone, has reversed course and made the correction.)īut the more interesting question that arose is this: When did the term orphan first enter typesetting argot? A few of us have been looking, and so far, we’ve found widow defined in references from before 1980, but we’ve found no references to orphan that old. As a result, a lot more people have the definitions wrong way round than have them in the traditional order. This led to Microsoft getting the definitions backwards in Microsoft Word. However, the Gregg Reference Manual, which has been the standard secretarial handbook for decades, got the definitions reversed. This is the general consensus among old-time compositors. An orphan is the opposite-the first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of the page. The original meaning of widow (in the typesetting context) is the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of a page. This raises a couple of questions, and in the course of the discussion, we resolved one of them. One of the criteria publishers often include in their specifications is “no widows or orphans.” The more criteria they specify, the more labor is required and the higher the price (no secret there). Publishers get to make choices when they are buying typesetting. For headings, it should cause no harm, since a heading normally fits on one line – but the setting is pointless for headings, since even the defaults prevent a 2- or 3-line heading from being broken (and a heading longer than 3 lines is really anomalous).I got into an interesting discussion the other day about a nicety of composition. So a 5-line paragraph may not be broken across two pages at all, and 6-line paragraph may only be broken as 3 and 3 lines. The example in the question thus means that a page break may not appear inside a p, h2, or h3 element, unless at least 3 lines of it appear on each page. It’s difficult to find use cases even for these. ![]() ![]() So why would you set those properties? Normally only as orphans: 1 or widows: 1 or both, to specify that typographic orphans or widows need not be avoided. The initial value of both properties is 2, which thus means that the single line orphans and widows (i.e., orphans and widows in the typographic sense) are to be avoided. It is rather difficult to find use for such a setting. Instead, it says that less than 4 lines of a paragraph at the end of a page be considered an orphan and be avoided. ![]() ![]() orphans: 4 does not mean four orphans anywhere. The definitions of the CSS properties are somewhat unnatural, since e.g. These generalizations are not particularly useful there is generally nothing wrong with having two (or three or.) lines of a paragraph on a page other than the rest of the paragraph. The CSS concepts are generalizations of the typographic concepts, replacing “the last line” by “the last few lines” and “the first line” by “the first few lines”. They are regarded as avoidable, though opinions disagree on how serious the problems are. So both are single lines that have been isolated from the rest of the paragraph by a page break. In typography, a “widow” is the last line of a paragraph that appears at the start of a new page, and an “orphan” is the first line of a paragraph that appears at the end of a page. ![]()
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