Widows and Orphans: Some of the Most Common Typesetting No-Nos

Here is our list of the most common typesetting no-nos and misconceptions, what they are, and how to avoid or fix them.

Quotation marks

Despite Microsoft Word’s automatic conversion of straight quotes to curly quotes, two typographic details still need checking: the direction of the mark and its spacing.

Generally speaking, when the quote marks are indeed quote marks, then the direction is usually correct, however, when the quote mark is not a quote mark, i.e. when it’s an apostrophe, then we have to be careful.

As we know, the apostrophe can mean two things, (a) possessive – “Raphaël’s computer”, and (b) missing text. So instead of writing “the 1990s” we might write “the ’90s” – note how the apostrophe needs to look like the closing quote mark.

The second problem is spacing at a change of style. If an italic word meets a roman apostrophe or other punctuation, inspect the join and kern it where necessary. The punctuation’s style should follow its function and the book’s conventions.

The prime (′) and double prime (″) are used for feet and inches, and for minutes and seconds of arc. They are distinct from apostrophes and quotation marks. Use the appropriate glyphs from a font that supplies them rather than slanting straight quotation marks.

Another use of quote-like marks is to distinguish ayin and alef in transliteration from Hebrew or Arabic. Scholarly systems may specify ʿ and ʾ respectively. Use the characters required by the chosen transliteration system consistently.

Indentations

Today where email and webpages are so much part of our lives, we are used to seeing paragraphs separated with a full line space and that each paragraph begins with no indent – also known as a blunt beginning. Most of the blog posts on this site are done like this.

This approach can suit letters, websites and some kinds of books. For continuous prose, however, first-line indents are a compact way to distinguish paragraphs without relying on a blank line that may disappear at a page break. The choice should suit the book and remain consistent.

In this style of book typesetting, a new paragraph should have its first line indented, also known as an indented paragraph (really, only the first line is indented). The typical amount of space to indent would be an em, but there are different ways of measuring this. A favourite is to draw a box from the bottom of the text’s baseline to the top of the x-height of the line below and use that as the indent.

Of course, after a heading the new paragraph is already clear, so in this style its first line is normally left unindented. This is a design convention to apply consistently, rather than a rule for every possible kind of book.

Another exception is when the paragraph following an extract is not a new paragraph but rather a continuation of the paragraph before the extracted text (see the next paragraph for an example). Another distinction not visible to the reader with spaced blunt paragraphs.

Widows and Orphans

Interestingly, the terminology varies. Here I use the following definitions of widows and orphans:

A widow is the last line of a paragraph at the top of a page or column.

An orphan is the first line of a paragraph at bottom of a page or column.

This is how both Tschichold in his book, “The Form of the Book” and Robert Bringhurst in “Elements of Typographic Style” define these terms.

There is also the runt: a very short final line of a paragraph. It is especially worth reviewing when it is shorter than the indent of the paragraph that follows.

Now that the terms are defined, what is the rule? Bringhurst advises avoiding widows while allowing ordinary orphans (version 3.0, §2.4.8). Chicago 18, §2.121, allows a paragraph’s final line at the top of a page only if it fills the measure, and permits a new paragraph to begin at the foot. A publisher may specify stricter rules. In every case, check that a page break does not obscure a paragraph or section boundary.

Dashes

There is an important distinction between a hyphen and an en dash: an en dash can indicate a range, as in 1–5 March. A dash marking a break in a sentence serves a different purpose, and conventions for its length and spacing vary.

Chicago normally uses closed-up em dashes for a break in a sentence. My preference is a spaced en dash, a convention Chicago itself recognises as common in British usage (§6.89). Choose the convention required by the book’s style and apply it consistently; it would be misleading to say that all typography manuals prescribe the same dash.

If you have a manuscript that needs typesetting without widows, then contact us for a no-obligation discussion.

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