[Tex/LaTex] Widow word on a page? I thought LaTeX wouldn’t do that

page-breakingwidows-orphans

Just had a surprise. I have a section in an article followed by a figure. The text flows over a page and … one more word on the next page (which also includes the figure).

Yes, I added a ~ before that word to make it fit on the first page but I thought LaTeX wouldn't do this (leave widow words, not even sentences)!

Is there anything in particular that needs to be enabled to avoid this? I used MikTeX 2.8 with output to PDF (both pdftex and pdflatex produced the same problem).

Best Answer

LaTeX is set up to avoid this if possible but sometimes there just isn't a good alternative. You can suppress widow lines entirely with \widowpenalty=10000 but you'll want to have \raggedbottom enabled.

Avoiding widow words isn't as directly straightforward. You cannot automatically suppress them but you can specify that you want a final line of at least some certain length with

\parfillskip 0pt plus 0.75\textwidth

where "some certain length" is, in this case, one quarter of the text width of the document.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] LaTeX: First page blank

Even a tiny difference in the computed dimensions may produce an overfull box. So I suggest another approach: zero margin and vertical centering.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[a4paper,margin=0pt]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\newcommand{\vcenterincludegraphics}[2][]{%
  \newpage
  \vspace*{\fill}
  \includegraphics[#1]{#2}\par
  \vspace{\fill}
  \newpage
}
\pagestyle{empty}


\begin{document}

\centering

\vcenterincludegraphics[width=17.7cm]{pg1}

\vcenterincludegraphics[width=17.7cm]{pg2}

\vcenterincludegraphics[width=17.7cm]{pg3}

\vcenterincludegraphics[width=17.7cm]{pg4}

\vcenterincludegraphics[width=17.7cm]{pg5}

\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] automatically to apply \enlargethispage{\baselineskip} when single-word-widow occurs

Without an example it is hard to say but if you add

\widowpenalty=10000

Then TeX will try as hard as it can to avoid widows. The tolerance settings probably are not doing very much in your case as with such short paragraphs there is very little flexibility in line breaking anyway.

If there is any vertical stretch in your page (as in the default parskip spacing in standard classes) then probably preventing widows will pull the last couple of lines over to the next page. If there is no vertical stretch then you will get an underfull page on the previous page, in which case you could potentially detect that in the output routine and put the text back after enlarging the page but such interactions are very delicate and depend greatly on the content you have as it's very hard to make things work in general.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] LaTeX: First page blank

[Tex/LaTex] automatically to apply \enlargethispage{\baselineskip} when single-word-widow occurs

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