Marcello wrote:
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.
Another tweak in higher-end typesetting engines (of which Adobe Indesign is at the lower end) is to look at selected hyphenation to compress the text a little more, and even do small tweaks to the character spacing, both of which sometimes leads to freeing up a line in a paragraph.
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.
Agreed. Leading changes on one page can lead to left-right-page differences which will be noticeable. One solution is that the leading on the left/right pages are tweaked together.
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 the case of reproducing already existing (finished texts), rewriting is definitely not an option!
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.
Definitely. However, there is the possibility that future automated typesetting engines may improve the widows/orphans problems by multiple attacks on the various parameters that can be tweaked.
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?
<laugh/> Jon