Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by fhub | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

fhub·

Two definitions that I had to look up.

* Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column.

* Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.

View on HN

The German is more crass: Hurenkind and Schusterjunge, translates to 'child of a whore' and 'shoemaker boy'. The child of a whore does not know where it comes from (who is their father), the short final line - the shoemaker boy is so poor, he does not know where he will end up (the short first line)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116

Those who lived through the (text-mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features which was advertised for this program, i.e it could be set to either move that orphaned first line of a new paragraph to the next page or move a few extra lines or a whole paragraph to the next page to keep the widow company.

Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.

I remember using WordPerfect in that era and never understanding what that feature was. It seemed implausible to me that it was actually protecting human widows and orphans, but I couldn't imagine what it had to do with text layout!

Kinda cool when you learn the answer to something you were wondering about decades ago.

Absolutely! Unfortunately for me, I probably wondered about this 35 years ago and learned the answer 15 years ago. Otherwise, I could be one of today's lucky 10,000 in the xkcd 1053 sense.

There are also Rivers - when spaces between words on multiple lines align vertically. Harder to control for than widows and orphans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com