Re: Content vs. design: orphans
I'm the only technical writer in a small company, and my job description includes not only writing but also editing and desktop publishing.
Welcome to the club.
Today I was having a rather lengthy discussion with our graphic designer about orphans. We have five software manuals (100-300 pages each) that are supposed to go to press today, but of course everyone wanted a lot of last-minute changes. The graphic designer thinks that orphans in the manual (one-word lines according to Chicago or .75" or less lines according to our designer) are serious enough to keep the manual from going to press. He thinks that we should do anything we can to get rid of them, including very tight tracking (up to -20) or rewriting the text.
Short answer:
Your graphic designer is incorrect on a couple of counts. Long answer below.
Now I'd love to have manuals with no orphans in them, but as a technical writer, I have to get documents out fast. I don't have time to rewrite the text, I don't think that I should have to change the text just to accommodate the design, and I'm not willing to compromise the readability of the text by very tight tracking. I'm new to the field (just graduated from college in April) and I'd like to know what other writers out there do. Are orphans acceptable in manuals considering the tight time frame? What do your companies do? Which comes first: content or design?
Long answer:
Dianna,
I've set type off and on since 1960, including several years with a company that composes scholarly and technical books, so I'm in a pretty good position to correct your designer's misconceptions, set straight the backwards definitions in some DTP software, and help you out of your current difficulty.
Let's start with a definition of widow. A widow is the last line of a paragraph appearing at the top of a page. A secondary definition is a very short last line of a paragraph, typically meaning the last portion of a hyphenated word or a very short word (2 or 3 letters). An orphan is the first line of a paragraph appearing at the bottom of a page. Some programs have these definitions reversed, which can lead to a certain amount of consternation on occasion.
Now let's talk about publishing standards. Avoiding widows (primary definition) and orphans is a target, but sometimes they are simply unavoidable. If the design calls for text pages to be full depth, with facing pages matching in length, it is the layout person's job to adjust the placement of figures and tables and the spacing around headings to avoid widows and orphans. But in a passage of continuous text that goes on for a few pages, sometimes this is not possible. In that case, having an orphan is preferable to having a widow; but if the widow is unavoidable, so be it. If there is no page footer in the design, it is perfectly acceptable to have a 2-page spread run a line long or a line short to avoid problems, but two successive spreads can only differ by one line, not two. If there is a footer, especially if there is a footer rule, then such adjustments are undesirable and a widow or orphan is preferred.
As to the secondary definition of widow, the very short last line of a paragraph, these are almost always avoidable. First of all, as the writer, you have all the authority you need to drop an unneeded word or choose a longer synonym somewhere in the paragraph. This is usually the easiest fix, unavailable to someone doing composition independent of the author, but readily available to you. Otherwise, a program like InDesign will handle the logic for you, but in less sophisticated programs, you can learn to fix these on the fly. You can put a hard return before the full last word if the word is breaking, for example. If this results in the second-last line being too spread out, you can scan up the paragraph for a tighter line and put the hard return on that line instead (talking about Shift+Enter here), causing the rest of the paragraph to be recomposed. Or you can find a relatively loose line in the paragraph and tighten up the tracking slightly on that line (be sure to catch the following syllable), too draw the paragraph up a line.
In my experience these situations occur infrequently and don't take much time to correct. I tend to do them as I work along and make adjustments as needed when there are subsequent text changes. However, in a deadline situation, if something has to give, avoiding widows and orphans is pretty low on the priority list and absolutely should not delay publication. In technical writing, content is always more important than typographic niceties (much as I like to fondle fonts); so don't sweat this one.
As for your graphic designer, he should stop whining. Calling a three-quarter-length line a widow is just perverse. What he should concentrate on is developing a page design that is appropriate to the content you are producing. Most user manuals do not even make a pretense of maintaining a consistent bottom margin, preferring instead to insert figures in running text and let page breaks fall where they may. So tell the guy to stop complaining and do his job, okay?
Dick
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Follow-Ups:
- Re: Content vs. design: orphans, Peter Neilson
References:
Content vs. design: orphans: From: Dianna Bearce
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