I’m compiling a collection of stories as a PDF, so that various people can read it for literals. Unfortunately, there are some nasty danglers at top and bottom of pages.
How do I succeed in the bloody operation of killing widows and orphans? Can’t find anything in the help files.
There is no widow and orphan support in Scrivener - widows and orphans is a complex layout task (seriously - I took out a technical support ticket with Apple over this last year and even the Apple text system gurus couldn’t get it to work with the OS X text system!), and thus it’s left to external word processors. So, if you want widow and orphan control, export to Word or another word processor that supports this feature and print or generate your PDF from there.
All the best,
Keith
Ah, that’s a nuisance, Kevith. What about when compiling for epub?
Widows and orphans have no meaning in .epub, which is an HTML format and so flows.
D’oh!
The only good solution to widows and orphans is the same as was back in linotype days: recast the bloody line, or paragraph. (I spent many hours a month killing them at the print shop, but that was fifty years ago. And it’s a good solution only if you’re willing to tweak your own – or someone else’s – prose.) But that was in a day when flush left/flush right justified was the standard; now that ragged right is acceptable, even sometimes standard, widows and orphans draw less attention.
Still, if you must get rid of them, line-by-line revision is the best way.
ps
Tis true for you, so tis.
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