[Scribus] orphans/widows

[Louis Desjardins]

>Hi everybody,
>
>a short question:
>
>As I understand it, a mechanism to prevent orphans and widows will 
>be implemented in a later version of scribus. Has anyone here found 
>a neat trick to work around the problem with scribus 1.2.1?

Hi Christoph,

The short answer is no, not really.

Here are a few hints for that, when you do it manually.

Various parameters will make widows and orphans occur often, or 
rarely, such as:
* length and number of paragraphs.
* number of lines per page or column.
* width of justification in page or column.
* typesize or average number of letters on each line.
* various levels of text (subtitles and other subdivisions)

 From within the Story Editor, you have access to such settings as 
Horizontal Scaling (in %) and Tracking/Kerning (in pts) which you 
cannot control from a Stylesheet but that you can apply to formatted 
text, even if it is formatted with a stylesheet.

Be *very* cautious with those settings as they can really affect the 
type in a way your readers will hardly be able to... read! 1 or 2 % 
of H-scale will rather go unoticeable to the vast majority of people, 
but it sure can make a difference. Tracking/Kerning is the same. Do 
it. But smoothly. A tenth of a point is already something, especially 
if your text is under 12 points. Tightening type can cause more 
damages (in general) than loosening it in terms of readability.

Basically, these are the 2 settings for you to control widows and orphans.

You then have 2 choices, depending upon your specific situation:

a. You try to get rid of a short line at the end of a previous 
paragraph by tightening the paragraph. Minus values for tracking, 
less than 100% for H-Scale.

b. You try to expand one long line at the end of a previous paragraph 
by loosening the paragraph. Plus values for tracking, plus than 100% 
for H-Scale.

You have to judge what solution is the less "destructive" to your 
overall "typographic grey".

One last thing to control is the hyphenations settings: make sure the 
hyphens help you achieve a nice job. I mean, no whole in the line of 
type. Be cautious and make tests with a duplicate of the text frame 
because the de-hyphenate function is yet to be implemented into 
Sribus.

In the worst cases, you'll have to edit the text, whenever this is possible.

HTH

Louis


>
>Thanks in advance
>
>Christoph
>
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