Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
the "pimples", in your .pdf files, are widows and orphans.
to the typographically knowledgeable, they're eyesores. and since they appear so frequently within your .pdf's -- practically every other page-spread -- it's distracting, distracting enough that it's impossible to see much else...
fortunately, i think there is probably some easy setting that you can make to eliminate all the windows/orphans.
If we want to eliminate the widows and clubs we must - include `stretchability' in the leading or - have a ragged bottom. Both solutions can be worse eyesores than the original problem. With stretchable leading the lines on the left hand page will not match the lines on the right hand page. With ragged bottom, facing pages may be of different length. In commercial typesetting these problems are overcome by manually tightening or loosening some paragraphs on the page, or even making the author rewrite some of the copy to fit the page. In a purely automated process this is impossible. We also want to keep the flexibility of changing fonts, page sizes etc. so we cannot insert manual fixes. I know that you will write a program over the weekend that solves exactly this problem that Dr. Knuth was not able to solve. But what good is it to me if you don't ever show a single line of all the fantastic code you wrote? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org