Widows & Orphans
Show/Hide Widows and Orphans toggles highlighting to show widows and orphans in the text.
Widows and orphans are text composition problems common in continuous prose.
Specifically…
A widow is the last line of a paragraph, stranded at the top of a column or page.
An orphan is the first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a column or page.
Once identified, the user can choose to fix these issues with Keep Options, tracking, and/or rewriting.
Note: Short last lines of a paragraph (or runts) are sometimes mistakenly referred to as widows. While related to widows and orphans, these are a different issue. To prevent short last lines apply a No Break to the last 8-10 characters of body text paragraphs by means of a GREP Style. (see Show / Hide No Breaks).
