What is the proper way to prevent widows/orphans/runts in Indesign?

[landscape_snarkitect]

My breif graphic design training taught me that you should not have single or double words at the end of paragraphs. 

What is the "right" way to prevent these within a text box? If I have consistent text formatting throughout a document, I don't want to stretch the text boxes in inconsistent ways. 

• Hard return after the third last word in the sentence prior?
• Increase the kearning settings?
• Some other fancy indesign setting?

Thanks!

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Please check this thread: 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/does-it-matter-if-my-book-layout-has-runts/m-p/1... 

But do it as a GREP Style. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The techniques to minimize/fix them is one thing; that link will give you all the basics. But eliminating such althogether is down to diligence by the designer. Not every detail can be automated or fixed by a feature.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Short line endings are not Widows or Orphans--they are paragraph issues. Some people call them Widows, so I tend to call them "Line Widows". 

This is what I do in my main Body style to prevent short endings:

I adjust the number depending on the column width used. If the character count hits mid-word, it still has to follow my hyphenation settings. 

[Joel Cherney]

I suggest the "All of the Above" opinion, with one caveat.

1) Robert directs you to a post from Eugene suggesting a GREP find-and-replace. I often do it that way, but more often I do as Robert suggests and build it into a body text paragraph style as a GREP style. At other times I will do a find&replace to add non-breaking spaces between the last word and the second-to-last word in a given body text paragraph style. 

2) Dave suggests adjusting your hyphenation settings as well, which when set correctly can really improve your rag and minimize runts. His settings look almost exactly like my own.

3) I will often increase or reduce tracking by a few points, in addition to maybe tweaking the kerning, in addition to maybe a percent of glyph distortion in the Justification dialog (typically frowned upon, around here), while I'm reducing reducing inter-word spacing by a few percent.

4) I try very hard to avoid soft returns, but every once in a while one is necessary.

5) Similarly I try to avoid increasing or decreasing the width of a frame in order to affect the rag.

6) But in the final analysis, these are all just tools, and what you really need to do is what James suggests; you need to set up your tooling, then you need to ride the lines, looking at the rag of every paragraph in your document, and be ready to use any of the tools at your disposal in your efforts to create an aesthetically pleasing rag. 

But: I never use a hard return, as I'm usually using a paragraph style with some kind of defined indent or paragraph spacing. So I don't suggest getting in this habit.

An aside about terminology: The terms "widow" and "orphan" are generally accepted to refer to lines of text which are either the first lines of paragraphs left behind on the previous spread, or last lines of paragraphs that get pushed by themselves to the next spread. These are the terms found in Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style. Many years ago (like, maybe 20 years ago?) we had a thread here where someone posted "What do you call it when someone leaves one word by iteslf on the last line of a paragraph? I see people calling them widows or orphans, but that terminology is incorrect, c.f. Bringhurst." So in that thread, the term "runt" was suggested, and ever since I've seen that terminology spreading throughout the Internet. However, the term "runt" never appears in Bringhurst.

You know what does appear frequently, all the way throughout the Elements of Typographic Style, though? Runts. They appear frequently, in any edition of the Elements that I've looked at. I guess he didn't think they were something to avoid? 

[Eugene Tyson]

I suggest the "All of the Above" opinion, with one caveat.

1) Robert directs you to a post from Eugene suggesting a GREP find-and-replace. I often do it that way, but more often I do as Robert suggests and build it into a body text paragraph style as a GREP style. At other times I will do a find&replace to add non-breaking spaces between the last word and the second-to-last word in a given body text paragraph style. 

By @Joel Cherney

The only reason I don't add it as a style, I think, is that others tend to work with the file and they don't use grep/styles as efficiently and sometimes I get the file back and the smart styles with GREPs are gone or changed and don't work as intended. 

I find a 'Find/Replace' using a Multi Find Change of all my GREPs works best and just got into a habit, this physically adds the non-breaking space into the layout. 

If someone breaks the paragraph style GREP then it's destroyed everywhere in the document, at least physical characters are actually in the document, and when I get the document back and make a change to it I can apply the GREP functions I want to to add physical characters rather than no-break styling. 

Things like non-breaking spaces, non-breaking hyphens, digits followed by a space so dates are kept together. 

I actually have about 20 GREPs I run with a Multi Find Change tool - and if I built that into the styles, and it was broken by someone else, the time to fix to even miss that it's broken would be devasting for me. 

So I prefer adding physical characters so if someone else edits the document at least the characters are in place, rather than breaking/deleting/recreating/fxing styles etc. 

It works for me.

[landscape_snarkitect]

Thanks, everyone! I thought I was quite versed in Indesign, but apparently, I am unfamiliar with GREP. Would you mind breaking down the concept and how it works like I am a 7 year old? I quickly Googled it and I am a bit lost. I know it sounds bad but I have recently written off paragraph styles because an intern once set up a document with the language set to Burmese... as it turns out, once you apply it then it is impossible to change and spell check did not work for a 600 page document. I am a little weary of automated processes in Indesign and want to make sure I don't make any mistakes that cause heartache later...

Thanks!

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@landscape_snarkitect

"." = any character 

"{10}" = repeated up to 10 times

"$" = end of paragraph 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

"Writing off paragraph styles" in ID is about like writing off tires in F1 racing.

If you don't want automated processes, you might consider doing layout in Notepad. (I'm only being a bit snarky, here... but the point is that InDesign is not just Word with some extra features, it's a phenomenally powerful, and correspondingly complex tool for advanced layout. If you don't master its basic function and features, the advanced features will be a bewildering and confusing mess. Put another way: ID is one of the very last programs you can just sort of 'wing it' in.)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

But as for GREP, which is a very advanced feature taken mostly from Unix via programming/coding, there are good tutorials (as there are for every other feature — you might note that), and there's a superb book that focuses specifically on InDesign's slightly quirky implementation of it, GREP in InDesign, by Peter Kahrel. Indispensible if you want to get past a few basic search strings.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

>>Would you mind breaking down the concept and how it works like I am a 7 year old? 

Reminds me of the old Groucho Marx quip:

"Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it."

😜

[Mike Witherell]