Feature improveent request

[Woody44]

I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, but here's my request, with the reasons for it:

Like most word processing software, TextMaker offers a setting to prevent "widows" and "orphans" in typesetting. A "widow" is a single line of a multi-line paragraph that gets stranded at the top of a page. An orphans is a single line of a multi-line paragraph that gets stranded at the bottom of a page. Like most modern word processors, TextMaker provides a setting (under the text flow tab in the paragraph formatting dialogue) to activate o deactivate widow/orphan protection.

The problem is that they are together.

I am a self-published author. I use my word processor to format books for print. I also format books for other authors. In typesetting books, there is a constant conflict between preventing widows and orphans, versus ensuring that the block of text on each page starts and ends at the same point. This is referred to as "bottom balancing," or "square bottom." While we don't want widows and orphans, we also don't want one page to have fewer lines than other pages -- especially when they are facing pages.

Typographer Robert Bringhurst has a slightly different opinion. According to Bringhurst, “orphans need not trouble the typographer … but widows should get one extra line for company.” When widow and orphan protection is activated together, the result is almost always "short" pages. Then corrective measures (such as modifying tracking (character and/or word spacing) must be applied to try to eliminate the short pages.

https://raider.pressbooks.pub/pressbook ... balancing/

The other ("brute force") method is to NOT activate widow/orphan protection, and to go through each book to identify and to manually correct each instance of widows and orphans.

It would be a great benefit to self-published authors everywhere if the setting for widow/orphan protection could be split, so that we can select widow protection without simultaneously activating orphan protection. (Per Bringhurst.)

[ITFlip]

I vote for improved widow and orphan control. Although it currently works pretty well for me, I've been writing some longer documents recently and the automatic widow-orphan control can be frustrating. Sometimes I resort to inserting page breaks and carriage returns to achieve the desired result. This works okay on the final document, but if I need to edit it later, I have to review the whole document to delete and add page breaks where desired.

Being able to select ANY block of text to keep together on the same page would also be very helpful. I like to keep bulleted lists together for instance

Thanks for your consideration

[martin-k]

Being able to select ANY block of text to keep together on the same page would also be very helpful. I like to keep bulleted lists together for instance

That's what the "Keep together" checkbox is for.

[Woody44]

Being able to select ANY block of text to keep together on the same page would also be very helpful. I like to keep bulleted lists together for instance

That's what the "Keep together" checkbox is for.

But that has to be selected manually for each affected paragraph, correct?

What would be better (and what I'm suggesting) is to take the automatic widow/orphan protection and split it so the user can choose to prohibit just widows, just orphans, or both or neither. I don't know if that's too much of a coding change to implement this late in the development cycle. If so, please put it on the wish list for the next version. Adding this level of flexibility would put TextMaker a step ahead of other word processing programs.

[ITFlip]

Unfortunately, "Keep Together" does not work for bulleted lists or for numbered lists (the list will be split between pages), but it works quite nicely for paragraphs of text.

Each paragraph needs to have "Keep Together" applied and it doesn't seem to work to keep multiple paragraphs together.

The Paragraph Flow options mostly work for me, but having more flexibility would be useful (it would be great if I could keep certain lists together on one page).

[Woody44]

I vote for improved widow and orphan control. Although it currently works pretty well for me, I've been writing some longer documents recently and the automatic widow-orphan control can be frustrating. Sometimes I resort to inserting page breaks and carriage returns to achieve the desired result. This works okay on the final document, but if I need to edit it later, I have to review the whole document to delete and add page breaks where desired.

Within its limits, it works very well. The problem when using it to format books is that it often results in "short" pages, creating a visual imbalance between facing pages. To a book designer, that's anathema. The text block should align across facing pages.

Example of the problem:

Allowing us to choose only widow protection would reduce the number of resultant "short" pages that have to be manually corrected/adjusted.

[ITFlip]

I like and agree with your feature improvement request Woody44

[Woody44]

Update: I was just informed that both LibreOffice and OpenOffice DO allow selecting widow protection and orphan protection independently. I verified it.

That's all the more reason for TextMaker to allow them to be selected separately.