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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.

I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...

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> I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:

> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.

But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)

Widows are when the final line of a paragraph starts the next page. Orphans are when the first line of a paragraph ends a page.

Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.

How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?

Fewer people want to foster than to have their own kids?

For a foster parent you only need to find someone willing to adopt a child, which already register themself into a list. For marriage you need to find someone willing to marry and to marry you out of random people.

Also, marriage doesn’t imply children.

Depends, but I see what you mean.

Never "depends". Marriage doesn't guarantee children, nor even the desire to try for them, both of which can occur without marriage.

Sorta.

Neither the human orphan nor the widow is fixed by your description; they simply aren't alone either more.

The child is still an orphan; the woman a widow.

The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones: An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.

In german typography the name for widow is "Hurenkind" wich translates to "child of a whore". I was pretty surprised to hear that word on a regular basis while working in text for print. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

You will have to explain what a page is to the younger readers.

Surely they know the concept of a book

Are you sure about that?

It’s like when you click on a new link. That’s a page.

click?

> Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.

We're going to see more of this once diffusion language models mature. They won't match the exact length but will sure choose words to fix the set number of tokens.

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