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Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's talk about widow and orphan
lines in Pages.
So what is a widow and what's an orphan line? A widow line is like this. You are in Pages
and you've got a paragraph here, this is a whole paragraph, and the last bit of text
goes to the next page. Likewise an orphan line is kind of the opposite of that. It is
when you have a single line of a paragraph on one page and the rest of the paragraph
on the other.
You can get rid of these in Pages by simply going into the Inspector, go into the Text
Inspector, and using the prevent widow and orphan lines checkbox. You can do that for
the entire document by selecting All or simple putting your cursor in one paragraph and selecting
that one paragraph that way. So if I were to click on this you can see what it does
here. It prevents it by taking one more line from here and dropping it down to the next
page so that this paragraph doesn't have just one line dangling it has two. So it divides
it up.
Likewise if I were to create an orphan like this and put the cursor in this paragraph
then turn on Prevent wide and orphan lines you can see that it pushes that line down
to the next page here. So it prevents that awkward break.
Now by default this is on so if I select All I can select it and check and now this will
always make sure that there is no widow or orphan lines on a page.
Let's say you want more control. There is some other options here. For instance, you
can set a paragraph to always start on the next page. So say you have a small paragraph
here and this starts a new point and you really want this to always start on a new page here
you can put the cursor in that paragraph and select Paragraph starts on a new page. Now
now matter what text is inserted, even if you put a bunch of blank line here, you can
see that it pushes that paragraph to start on the following page.
You can also set it to make sure that paragraphs stick together. So for instance you have this
paragraph here that starts on this page, jumps to this one and then this next paragraph here.
If I want to make sure that this paragraph and this paragraph are always on the same
page I put my cursor in this paragraph and check off Keep with the following paragraph.
So that makes sure that the start of this paragraph is on the same page as the start
of this paragraph no matter how it falls in the layout.
So this last option here Keep lines together (actually the first option) makes sure that
if you select a paragraph and you turn on Keep lines together that paragraph will always
only appear on one page. So in this case it will always jump to the next page. You can
basically select your entire document and set that and ensure that paragraph breaks
will always fall on page breaks, even if it has to push the paragraph to the next page.
You can see here it left a pretty large space at the end to make sure that this paragraph
is always on the next page.
So this is all about making your Pages documents look nicer. It will look nicer if you avoid
widow and orphan lines and sometimes if you keep paragraphs together on a Page and sometimes
multiple paragraphs together with each other on a page. You can find out a lot about stuff
like this in my book My Pages. For instance on page 66 I've got a section on widow and
orphan lines and tons of other useful tips and tricks and a complete guide to using Pages
as a word processor and a page layout program.
Check it out.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.