They're working with publishers who can tell them precisely what size the pages are, what fonts are used, line spacing, and so forth. I've read various comments from my favourite authors about how they will sometimes have to rework some of their text to simply make a story fit 'right' in a book. On a traditionally published novel, getting rid of them is part of someone's job, and I see where they earn their money.Ī single orphaned word or sentence tends to stick out like a sore thumb, while a bit of extra space at the end of a page doesn't stick out so much. I don't use any of the formatting programs such as InDesign or Scrivener, they might have more convenient ways to do this. Changing formatting, correcting typos, changing fonts, changing margins, etc will all throw this completely off and you would need to go back through this again. Also, you want to generally do this last. Or sometimes there's no paragraph you can expand/condense (I wouldn't go beyond 0.2pt, but that depends on your font and size). Where this gets frustrating is that sometimes eliminating a widow creates an orphan on the same page or later, or vice versa. To eliminate widows/orphans, you're often not doing this to the actual paragraph, but typically a paragraph on the same page. When you do this, you're generally looking to condense paragraphs that are only a word or two to the next line or expand paragraphs that almost reach the end of the line. Or if you condense, you can reduce a paragraph and pull the page a line shorter. If you expand it, the spacing will increase and you can often push a paragraph to extend down another line. In Word (not sure other programs): highlight a paragraph, right click Font, go to the Character Spacing tab. You're going to need to mess with character spacing. Then look for pages with a widow or orphan. The only way I know of is to manually fix this.

Change widows and orphans in word 2010