Widows and orphans are single lines of a paragraph stranded where a page ends: a widow is a paragraph’s last line carried to the top of the next page, and an orphan is its first line left at the foot of a page. Widow/orphan control removes them but can leave pages short, which small changes to letter spacing can fix.
- What Are Widows, Orphans, and Runts?
- Should You Fix Widows, Orphans, or Both?
- Why Does Widow/Orphan Control Leave Some Pages Short?
- How Do You Fix Short Pages Without Bringing Back Widows and Orphans?
- What Other Page Make-Up Conventions Are Worth Knowing?
- Are These Rules You Have to Follow?
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Are Widows, Orphans, and Runts?
Widows and orphans are defined by where a line falls on the page. A widow is the last line of a paragraph, carried over on its own to the top of the next page, away from the rest of its paragraph. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph left alone at the foot of a page, with the rest of the paragraph continuing on the next page. Either can happen to any paragraph that runs from one page onto the next.
A runt is defined by length rather than position: it is a very short last line of a paragraph, such as one short word or the end of a hyphenated one, wherever on the page it falls. A runt that lands at the top of a page is a widow as well, and some publishers call every runt a widow. Usage varies from one publisher to another, so if you hire a formatter (the person who lays out a book’s pages for print), agree first on what each word means.
Should You Fix Widows, Orphans, or Both?
Many publishers today fix widows and accept orphans, although some still fix both. The older convention allowed neither, and some publishers relaxed it to allow orphans but not widows, a practice many others have since adopted.
The reason is visual. An orphan sits at the foot of a page and is usually a near-full line, so it blends into the page above it. A widow sits at the top of a page, the most conspicuous position there is, and as the end of a paragraph it is often short. Allowing orphans also means fewer lines have to move: a paragraph of three or more lines can then break with one line at the foot of a page and the rest on the next, so only a two-line paragraph ever has to move to the next page whole.
If you format in Microsoft Word, you cannot make that choice with Word’s automatic setting. Word’s Widow/Orphan control is a single checkbox that governs both together, so it cannot fix widows while leaving orphans alone.
Why Does Widow/Orphan Control Leave Some Pages Short?
Widow/orphan control removes widows and orphans by moving lines from one page to the next. And in a book whose lines are all the same distance apart, that leaves some pages shorter than others. That is true in any program, not a shortcoming of Word: the moved lines have to leave a gap somewhere.
The trade-off comes from how the control works. Microsoft’s help on page breaks says it “places at least two lines of a paragraph at the top or bottom of a page”: whenever a paragraph splits across two pages, at least two of its lines stay at the foot of the first and at least two go to the top of the next. To avoid an orphan, Word moves the lone first line to the next page. To avoid a widow, it moves the line before the widow over as well, so the widow has company. Either way, the page the lines leave ends early, usually by one line. A three-line paragraph that falls across a page break cannot split at all under this rule. So Word moves it to the next page whole, and the page it leaves can end two lines early.
Why a short page shows
Short pages stand out in a print book because of how formatters build its pages. They normally set the text with fixed leading (pronounced “ledding,” the distance from one line of text to the next), so every full page holds the same number of lines. Say that number is 31. When the control moves a line forward, the page it leaves has 30 lines. And nothing else in the layout changes to make up the difference. Books with longer paragraphs have fewer paragraph endings per page, so they meet short pages less often than dialogue-heavy fiction, with its many short paragraphs.
A short page matters because of the spread, the pair of facing pages a reader sees when the book lies open. The long-standing convention, called page balance, is that both pages of a spread end at the same height. In a thread on the forum of KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon’s self-publishing platform), “Orphans and widows,” a first-time author whose file did not have it on turned it on and reported the result in her own words: “That works but now some pages have less lines of text than others.” Other members recognized the same effect.
How formatters keep spreads balanced
When a spread cannot hold its full number of lines, formatters who keep spreads balanced usually allow exceptions in the order below. And every step keeps the two facing pages the same length as each other. On a book of 31-line pages, the order runs:
- Every page full: 31 lines on each page, which is the ideal.
- Both facing pages a line short: 30 lines on each, so the spread still ends level.
- Both facing pages a line long: 32 lines on each, which dedicated layout programs such as Adobe InDesign make straightforward and Word makes hard. Formatters avoid it when the page numbers (the folios) sit at the foot of the page, because the extra line crowds them.
- Two lines short, as a last resort: reached gradually over several spreads rather than all at once, so the spreads run full, one line short, two lines short, one line short, and full again. At two lines short a reader can see the page is short, so the gradual step matters more than it would at one line.
Balance matters most in solid blocks of text, such as novels and narrative nonfiction. In nonfiction broken up by short paragraphs, lists, and headings, an uneven spread is much harder to see.
Where the setting is in Word
In Word, the Widow/Orphan control setting is on the Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog. And Microsoft’s help notes that Word turns Widow/Orphan control on by default, so most documents already have that box checked, and the real decision is whether to leave it that way. In Word for Windows, Microsoft’s help on Line and Page Breaks says you open that dialog with the small arrow in the corner of the Paragraph group on the Home tab. In Word for Mac, choose Format > Paragraph from the menu bar. You can also right-click a paragraph in either version and choose Paragraph.
Whether the box comes checked depends on the template your document started from (the file Word uses as the starting point for a new document). The place to look is the paragraph style your body text uses, which is the named set of formatting that Word applies to every ordinary paragraph (often the style called Normal), because a change you make there reaches every paragraph at once.
In Word for Windows, right-click the style’s name in the Styles gallery on the Home tab and choose Modify. In Word for Mac, open the Styles pane from the Home tab, click the arrow beside the style’s name, and choose Modify Style. Either way, the Modify Style dialog has a Format button at the bottom left: choose Paragraph from it. If you want to avoid widows and orphans, check the box there so it applies throughout the book, then fix any short pages that bother you, as the next section explains.
How Do You Fix Short Pages Without Bringing Back Widows and Orphans?
With Widow/Orphan control on, the pages left to fix are the short ones, if they bother you. A page runs short where the control has moved a line forward to avoid a widow or an orphan. So the fix is to make one paragraph take up one line more or one line less, by tracking (described next), which lets the page fill again without bringing the widow or orphan back.
Where the page ran short to avoid a widow, tighten the paragraph that now carries its last two lines over to the top of the next page: taking one line out of it brings the whole paragraph back onto the short page. Otherwise, loosen a paragraph earlier on the short page by one line (or two, if the page ran two lines short), which fills the gap at its foot. A paragraph whose last line is nearly empty is the easiest to tighten, and one whose last line is nearly full is the easiest to loosen.
Every change reflows the text after it. So work from the start of the chapter and recheck the pages that follow each fix. The adjustments below are the usual ones, in the order a formatter tries them, and each one stays as small as possible. The first two are practical in Word; the third is a job for dedicated layout software.
First: adjust Word’s character spacing
Tracking, the spacing between letters across a run of text, is the main tool for making a paragraph one line shorter or longer: set it slightly tighter or looser across the whole paragraph, and the words rewrap onto one line fewer or one more.
Word calls tracking Spacing. It is in the Font dialog: in Word for Windows, open it with the small arrow in the corner of the Font group on the Home tab, and in Word for Mac, choose Format > Font from the menu bar. The control is on the Advanced tab, under Character Spacing. Condensed moves the letters closer together and Expanded spaces them further apart, by the amount you enter in the By box, which Microsoft measures in points. A point is the unit typesetters use to measure type, 1/72 of an inch, so these are very small amounts. Apply the change to a whole paragraph, so the spacing stays even across every line of it.
How small a spacing change to make
When you adjust tracking, aim for the smallest change that moves the line, because the smaller the change, the less a reader can see it. Word keeps character spacing only in steps of 0.05 point: it lets you type a value such as 0.08, but rounds it to the nearest step when it saves the file. So 0.08 comes back as 0.1. That leaves three useful amounts, 0.05, 0.1, and 0.15 point.
Here is how that works for a page that ran short to avoid a one-word widow. Select the whole paragraph that now carries two lines over to the top of the next page, choose Condensed, and type 0.05 in the By box (the arrows beside it move in steps of 0.1, so type the value). That takes 0.05 point from the space after every letter in the selection. If the paragraph does not pull back onto the short page whole, try 0.1, then 0.15, and keep the smallest amount that works. Beyond that, and certainly by 0.2 point, the change starts to show in text-sized type, and words begin to look as if they run together. If 0.15 is not enough, try loosening a paragraph earlier on the page instead; if neither works, move to the next adjustment.
Short paragraphs leave little room. In a two-line paragraph, tracking can only pull the second line up onto the first when it is a word or two, or push a word onto a third line when the second line is already nearly full.
The same tab has a Scale box, which squeezes or stretches the letters themselves by a percentage. Some people use it to fit a line, but narrowed or widened letters are more noticeable than well-judged tracking.
Second: adjust the space around headings and display elements
Adding or removing a couple of points of space above or below a heading, a block quotation (a passage quoted and set apart from the text), a list, or another element set apart from the body text can move a page break without touching the text itself. This mostly helps nonfiction, which has more of these elements to work with, and it works in Word. Dedicated layout software often aligns text to a baseline grid instead. And in a layout aligned to a baseline grid (a fixed set of positions that every line of text sits on), a change of a couple of points does nothing, because each element snaps back to the nearest grid position. Professional formatters generally leave the space between ordinary paragraphs of body text alone, because a book reads best with even spacing throughout.
Third: run the spread a line short or long, in layout software
When neither tracking nor the space around headings can refill a short page, a formatter working in dedicated layout software, such as Adobe InDesign, can run the spread a line short or a line long: one line fewer, or one more, on both facing pages, so they still end level and the difference is hard to see. Those programs have controls for this that Word lacks. In Word it is possible but challenging: it means inserting section breaks and changing the page margins for each short or long spread, then changing them back, which is easy to get wrong and easy for a later edit to undo. For most authors formatting in Word, tracking is the practical tool.
If you are formatting your own book: rewording
Authors who format their own books often mention rewording as a way to fix widows, orphans, and runts: cutting or adding a word, or splitting or combining paragraphs. In a KDP Community thread on runts, two authors described editing the text first and turning to spacing only when rewording would not work. It works, but it changes the text. A professional formatter should not reword your book to fix a layout problem, or ask you to, because the words are yours; when you are both author and formatter, the choice is yours to make.
Fixing runts
The usual fix for a runt, the very short last line of a paragraph, is to tighten the tracking of the whole paragraph slightly, which pulls the short last line up onto the line above. A common guideline is at least five characters on a paragraph’s last line. Another is not to hyphenate the last word of the line above just to put a few more characters on the last line. Tracking does not always work: runts are common in bulleted lists and narrow columns, where there is less room to adjust. And sometimes the right call is to leave one.
When to do this work
Fix widows, orphans, and runts last, once the text will not change again, and check them again after any correction made later. In a KDP Community forum thread on widows and orphans, an author found that corrections made after a printed proof copy (the test copy you can order before publishing) undid earlier fixes, because even an inserted comma can move words onto the next line.
What Other Page Make-Up Conventions Are Worth Knowing?
Page make-up is the arrangement of text on each page, and two conventions beyond widows and orphans are easy to miss. The first is that, by convention, the last page of a chapter carries at least four lines of text, so a chapter does not end on a page that looks nearly empty.
The second is that a heading near the foot of a page needs some text beneath it: at least four lines under a main subheading, and two or three under a lower-level one, depending on the design. Check headings near the foot of a page by eye.
Are These Rules You Have to Follow?
Avoiding widows and orphans, and keeping page balance (facing pages that end at the same height), are conventions that grew up over time, not rules. Each has some informed reasoning behind it and some tradition that is closer to superstition. And people feel very differently about them. Widows and orphans irritate some readers beyond measure; others never notice them, but may hate hyphens at the ends of lines with a passion. A good number of traditional publishers lose no sleep over orphans, though most still avoid widows. And a widow is high on the list of things to avoid if you can.
They are not reasons for rejecting a file, at least at the two print-on-demand platforms (services that print each copy when a customer orders it) we checked: we found nothing in KDP’s or IngramSpark’s help that treats them as a fault. KDP’s Paperback Submission Guidelines list the interior problems for which KDP can reject a paperback file, and widows, orphans, and short pages are not among them; IngramSpark’s File Creation Guide does not mention them.
Weighing the trade-offs
Fixing one thing can break another. Widow/orphan control, in Word or any other program, trades widows and orphans for short pages. And tracking pushed too far starts to show in the text. Authors weigh these trade-offs differently. On the KDP Community thread, one experienced member advised against using Word’s Widow/Orphan control at all, because the uneven facing pages it produces are ugly, while another did not mind facing pages that each run a line short. We know of no evidence that a short page troubles readers more than a widow, or the reverse. So judge how much each one matters to you, choose the result you prefer on your own pages, and apply it consistently.
Decide first whether widows and orphans bother you. If they do, turn on Widow/Orphan control for the whole book, then fix any short pages that bother you with the smallest tracking change that works. Do the work last, once the text is final, and check the result on a printed proof copy.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are widows and orphans in typography?
Widows and orphans in typography are single lines of a paragraph stranded where one page ends and the next begins. A widow is the paragraph’s last line carried over to the top of the next page; an orphan is its first line left alone at the foot of a page. Some publishers also use “widow” for any very short last line of a paragraph, which others call a runt.
Why do some people consider widows and orphans poor typography?
Some people consider widows and orphans poor typography because they separate a line from its paragraph, and a widow stands out most: it sits at the top of a page and is often short. Avoiding them is a convention built up over time rather than a rule, and we found nothing at KDP or IngramSpark that treats them as a reason to reject a file. A good number of traditional publishers accept orphans, though most still avoid widows. Fixing them can cause other problems, such as short pages, so judge how much they matter to you.
Where is widow and orphan control in Word?
Widow and orphan control in Word is a checkbox on the Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog, which Microsoft’s help on Line and Page Breaks settings says you open from the Paragraph group on the Home tab in Word for Windows. In Word for Mac, it is under Format > Paragraph, and in either you can right-click a paragraph and choose Paragraph. One box controls both widows and orphans. In a book whose lines are all the same distance apart, checking it leaves some pages shorter than the page facing them, as widow and orphan control does in any program. Small changes to letter spacing can refill those pages, so check your facing pages afterward.
Does KDP reject books with widows or orphans?
We found nothing in KDP’s help that treats widows or orphans as a reason to reject a paperback: they are not among the interior problems listed in KDP’s Paperback Submission Guidelines. If you format a print book with Kindle Create, Amazon’s free formatting tool, KDP’s Kindle Create help says the tool “automatically optimizes your book to minimize widowed and orphaned paragraphs.” Kindle Create has no setting for them, though, and KDP reflows the file to your trim size when you upload it, so the line and page ends you see in Kindle Create are not the ones that print. If you want close control over your print pages, a tool that lets you set widow and orphan control yourself will suit you better; either way, check the facing pages in your printed proof copy.
Do I need to fix widows and orphans in an ebook?
You do not need to fix widows and orphans page by page in a reflowable ebook, the usual kind, because the reading app decides where each screen ends as the reader changes the text size. Apps differ in how they handle widows and orphans; on Kindle e-readers, Enhanced Typesetting controls them. A fixed-layout ebook or a PDF keeps its pages exactly as set, so check it the way you would check a print book.
