Keeping the typographic family together
The terms “widow” and “orphan” aren’t quite as sad in design circles as they are in, say, the last Charles Dickens novel you read, but you still don’t want to be causing either of them.
Take a look at the last long document you created. See that word on a single line all by itself at the end of a paragraph? That’s a widow. You’ve left her there all by herself with out any friends or family around, taking up an entire line, surrounded by nothing but alienating whitespace. How can you help? Well, in a printed document you can just add a line break to the previous line of text, forcing one more word into that last line. If doing so causes a full paragraph break, you may have to perform some technical finagling with your editing app (sometimes holding the Shift key down when you hit Return will solve this problem, or your application – Word, et al – may have Widow and Orphan Control built in that needs to be turned on).
On the web, it can be a bit trickier, since the flow of textual content can be different depending on the device where it’s being read. In these cases, your best bet is often to just edit your copy a bit by adding or subtracting a word (or, if you’re geeky enough, you can surround the last two words of your paragraph with a <span style=”white-space:nowrap;”> tag).
Have you ever been reading a newspaper article, reached the end of a column and… wait a minute, where is the rest of this sentence? It’s waaaaaay up at the top of the next column or page, and that ending word or phrase is an orphan. Sometimes an orphan can be rescued by adjusting the column height so that the whole sentence is together, but rewriting the copy is often the only way. Note that orphans are mostly found in printed text, since website content isn’t generally limited by the same space restrictions.
So after you’ve dotted those i’s and crossed all of your t’s, be sure to give your content that final bit of polish by returning those poor widows and orphans to their happy typographic families.