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Layout

Which Line Moves

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

A page begins with three words. They are the tail 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 What the instruction leaves out is the price of obeying it.

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • Two names, loosely attached
  • The cost nobody has measured
  • The compositor’s actual remedies
  • Penalties, and what a penalty actually does
  • What the prevention costs
  • Which cost you would rather pay

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