At 2023-06-15T13:41:38-0500, Dave Kemper wrote: > Although Wikipedia says there's no agreement on the definitions of > "widow" and "orphan" > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans), web research has > led me to conclude that there's a stronger consensus than Wikipedia > credits: that orphans are at page bottom and widows at page top.
This convention is difficult for me to internalize. > As two data points, these are the definitions used by typography > expert Robert Bringhurst (as quoted long ago on this list by Steve > Izma (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2004-03/msg00091.html), himself a > knowledgeable and experienced typographer), I have his book and started to read it. The early material has interest but is not of utility to me as a groff developer. Perhaps my organs of artistic appreciation are withered and insensitive. > and are the ones assumed by the -ms parameter names PORPHANS and > HORPHANS, which control bottom-of-page line allotment. Also true. > This part of commit 78b4d92c4, on the other hand, introduced text in > the groff info manual a couple weeks ago using the opposite > definitions: > > > +@cindex widow > > +We can require space for at least the first two output lines of a > > +paragraph, preventing its first line from being @slanted{widowed} at the > > +page bottom. > > What do our resident typographers regard as a widow and an orphan? For those who couldn't guess, the new language here is from me, so I wear the blame. At 2023-06-15T15:10:41-0400, Peter Schaffter wrote: > Without wanting to be presscriptive about something so touchy, I > learned the following when I was an apprentice typesetter: "Widows > have no future and orphans have no past." If "future" and "past" mean "words {after, before} them on the page", then I find this mnemonic intuitive and easy to retain. I'd hesitate to add it to our official documentation for cultural reasons.[1] > A single word at the bottom of the page has no "future" words > afterwards; a single word at the top of the page has no "past" words > preceding it. Exactly. Strangely, though, I've had a habit (I think only in commit messages) of referring to the stranding of a single word at the _beginning_ of a line, as with "reasons" above, as "orphaning" it. Not sure why my brain did that. Maybe I should amend my uses to say "stranding" in this case. And perhaps that points the way to a less troublesome analogy. Perhaps we could employ terms like "forward stranding" and "backward stranding"? Though I foresee difficulties there, to, depending on whether one identifies the thing being stranded as the smaller portion of the text or the greater one. _My_ intuition would be toward the smaller, as "stranding" implies, to me, separation from a larger body, but as we've seen, my intuition is sometimes capricious. Regards, Branden [1] It seems to imply a patriarchal view of a woman's utility after marriage. Since at least my first decade of life, the invariably empowering and liberating consequences of disposing of one's male spouse or partner has been a recurring theme of entertainment (it fueled a U.S. cable network dedicated wholly to the premise).
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