Re: Debunking a myth: Knuth-Plass as a silver bullet for widow/orphan management

Hi,

Tadziu Hoffmann <[email protected]> writes:

> TeX's formatting model is based on optimization, finding the
> "least bad" instance of a line-broken paragraph.  How "bad"
> orphans ("clubs" in TeX) and widows are considered to be
> is user-specifiable.  If you don't set a sufficiently high
> penalty for these, then other criteria will dominate, and
> TeX will in fact produce output with stranded lines.

The TeXFAQ at https://texfaq.org/FAQ-widows says “These penalties are
usually set to the moderate value of 150; this offers mild
discouragement of bad breaks.”

Since the TeXbook also mentions 150 as value for these two penalties,
this obviously goes back to D. Knuth himself.  I’m pretty sure that he
spent some time thinking about the default value.

-- 
Stefan