Actually, everyone agrees what excellent type should look like. I agree with people like Sandee Cohen, Roger Black, Robin Williams, and many others. I do not know any traditional typesetter who uses these conventions, but then I only know a few hundred or so.

Programmers usually have no idea what a widow is. The software will really mess you up here, if you are not careful. (But then his typography is filled with short sentence fragments at the end of paragraphs that look horrible, as far as I am concerned.) You need to eliminate all of them like the word “above” which follows: a-īove. Bringhurst says at least four characters. The best answer is that the last line must have at least two complete words and those two words must be at least eight characters total. A widow is a short line at the end of a paragraph that is much too short. What is too short? Again, there is sharp debate. I am using the most common definitions (also the ones used by Black). Eliminate widows and orphansĪs Roger Black states in his pioneering work, Desktop Design Power (Random House, 1990, out of print) “Widows are the surest sign of sloppy typesetting.” The problems arise as soon as we start trying to simply define the words. I mean InDesign justifies well, but not that well. I later turned it back on for the body copy-simply because the type color was no longer smooth enough. I’ve tried to turn hyphenation off for an entire book. In your header paragraph styles, simply turn hyphenation off. Normally they need to be broken for sense with soft-returns. In fact, almost all headers should be carefully examined if they go to two lines or more. Be careful with hyphens!įinally, never hyphenate a word in a headline or subhead. It is worth setting up a custom shortcut to do that quickly as you edit. In this case, you usually have to set the No Break attribute for the word (in the Option menu of the Character panel). The final problem comes when the program hyphenates part of a compound word. Yet another problem comes when you run into something like two hyphens in a row then a normal line then two more hyphens. Page layout software allows you to set that limit. Most of us agree that two hyphens in a row should be the maximum (a three-hyphen “stack” looks odd). You can set up the hyphens when you add new words to the user dictionary (see InDesign’s help).Īnother problem is that automatic hyphenation can create hyphens for many consecutive lines. Because typeset line endings are automatic, so is the hyphenation.

Remove widows and orphans in word 2010