Widow (typesetting)

In typesetting, a widow is "a paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page or column." Its companion orphan is "a paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page or column," and the article keeps the pair honest: "the pairing of the two terms with their definitions has no consistent standard across the industry; some sources use the opposite meanings to others." Style guides still agree on the goal: citing Chicago, an edited manuscript "should have neither widows nor orphans, even if their elimination leaves blank space at the bottom of the page," and most full-featured word processors and layout applications include an automatic setting that prevents them.

For the self-publishing novelist it is a last-pass print check: widows and orphans appear only once text is paginated at a fixed trim size, and every fix shifts the breaks that follow. The interior is built in how to create a print-ready PDF.