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Layout

Which Line Moves

·6 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

A page begins with three words. They are the end of a sentence that started overleaf, and below them stands a full column of new text, so the first thing the page does is finish something the reader had already put down. The trade calls those three words a widow, and its instruction about a widow is to get rid of it.1 The instruction does not say what obeying it costs.

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • Two names, loosely attached
  • A reading cost that has not been measured
  • What a compositor could actually do
  • What a penalty does in TeX
  • The page the line leaves short
  • Keep the prevention, and look at the spread

About the book

Notes

  1. Book Design and Production for the Small Publisher, Full-text search snippet from a book-design handbook: the make-up checklist question about widows at the tops of pages or columns. One indexed snippet from a production handbook, read through Open Library’s full-text search on 16 September 2026. It establishes that the check is current trade practice, not that any particular definition is authoritative. Evidence C: professional practice or tradition.

Sources

  • Book design & production for the small publisher (Open Library full-text search result). openlibrary.org

Further reading