Hanging widows in tables

[Teo116]

Hi, I am working on my first book layout in InDesign.
I was told that hanging widows should be avoided. However, does it matter when there is only a little text, like in the example? I can't adjust the width of the columns. If I have a hanging widow (right), it looks a bit nicer, but if I don't (left), it feels a bit odd.

What makes the most sense for my example? Or just in general tables with little text?

[jmlevy]

What makes the most sense for my example?

My mother tongue is French, but I think it will be the same in German: none of them.

You should not leave a single word on the line, but you should send the word “ihre” at the beginning of the second line.

Why? There are 2 reasons:

1.  The second line will be longer than the first, so it will be more balanced
2. Grammatically, the possessive adjective should stay with the name it refers to.

[Mike Witherell]

This is an example of a short line, also known as a runt line. It is not a widow/orphan typesetting situation.

In a table where you cannot alter the width, you might consider:
Rewriting the expression to be either longer to better fill the short line, or shorter to make it one line?

Rewriting the expression to improve the expression grammatically (as JMLevy suggests) and therefore breaking the line manually to at least improve grammatical phrasing?

A paragraph style controlling the text can have Balance Ragged Lines turned on?

Can you increase the Cell Insets?

Can you make peace with the fact that tables are often unavoidably nicht schön? 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

If manually breaking lines for better balance isn't workable, I'd give Balance Ragged Lines a shot. But yes, overall, single words and other very short text on a new line is to be avoided.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I did a little searching to clarify my understanding of the terms and found I am not the only one who finds them murky. Your designer humor for the day, courtesy of Wikipedia:

I say we call them smeerps and be done with it. 😄

[Joel Cherney]

I'm in almost complete agreement with you here, Mike, but upon close reading of jmlevy's post, he's not actually suggesting copyediting to fit. He's simply suggesting to wrap with grammar in mind - to keep "ihre grössten" together, to keep the pronoun attached to its phrase.

I'm generally quite opposed to the practice editing copy to get it to fit into a design, but this is because my resposibility is to ensure the fidelity of a translation when flowing it into someone else's design. Messing with the translation to get it to fit the design is pretty much the exact opposite of ensuring fidelity, and so my practice is to mess with the design instead. Here, even though the OP clearly states "I can't adjust the width of the columns" that's the first thing I would do; I'd make the table wider to accomodate wider columns. Beyond that I'd change the cell insets, I'd reduce inter-word spacing in the Justification dialog... I'd even apply a few points of tracking, or a percent or two of horizontal glyph distortion. I'd even reduce font size by a few tenths of a point. I'd do pretty much anything to avoid copy-editing to fit. 

But, sometimes, there isn't much else you can do to prevent an ugly rag in a table cell. In those cases, either "making edits" or "making peace" should work. I support making peace, personally, but I suppose there's a place for making edits, as well. 

[Joel Cherney]

I'm stuck on the job I'm actually supposed to be doing, so I'm returning to this topic with some unnecessary historical ruminations:

1) I was paging through Bringhurst's Elements of Typographical Style looking for discussion of runts. I didn't find any; what I found instead was a tacit admission that there's nothing really wrong with a runt in a very short fragment of text, like a table header or a section subheading. Here are three examples, the third of which introduces his discussion of orphans and widows.

Bringhurst doesn't seem to have a runt problem! 

2) You know, James, I did go looking for the history of runts. My problem is that I have very clear recollections of a long, contentious discussion we had in I think either the InDesign forum or the Typography forum, in ye olde Adobe User-to-User Forums, circa 2002.  In that discussion, we found that many of the designers were using the word "orphan" to describe "the last word of a paragraph on its own line" when the technical definition, straight out of Bringhurst,  was "the first line of a paragraph by itself at the end of the page, with the rest of the paragraph on the following page." (Bringhurst says that orphans are not a problem; it's widows that he tells us to avoid, at least in my ancient 2nd edition from 1997.) At the conclusion of the thread, we basically all agreed to popularize the word "runt" instead of letting people fight over whether or not it was an "orphan." 

(Do you remember this at all, @Peter Spier ? Is my brain creating a false memory, here? I have a hard time imagining that you wouldn't take part in that kind of discussion.)

That forum software and its discussions are long gone (RIP) so it's all net apocraphya now. Here's a screenshot from the /r/typography subreddit:

Lost to the mists of time.... let's just call 'em smeerps, then. 

[Peter Spier]

@Joel Cherney  Love to say I remember that specifically, but my aging brain is now having trouble remembering what I ate for breakfast.

[Eugene Tyson]

Add a non-break style to the text for the last space in a paragraph

Create a character style and call it no-break - and only tick on the No Break function in the Character Style

In your paragraph style you can then add in the Grep Style section 

You'd have to finese the GREP to suit your needs, there's probably a better way than this

(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s*$|(\S+)(\s)(\S+)(\s*[[:punct:]]?)$

This grep is two parts split by the pipe '|'

First search is for the last space in a paragraph

The 2nd part searches for alternate spacing you might encounter in other languages, like French where it could be 'asda dasdkl ?' with spaces before punctuation. 

It should catch most instances if you have any issues we'd need to see exact text to build the GREP.