Re: Widows in e-books

Widows and orphans in ebooks are often more a matter of the
reflowing of text and where the lines fall, especially in
systems that allow the person reading the book to change
the default font size.  Most ebook software, regardless of
the hardware that it's running on, doesn't try to suppress
widows or orhans by default (if it can do so at all).

If your target is ePub or some other HTML-based format that
supports CSS, you might try adding

  page-break-inside: avoid;

to the CSS for the relevant elements (paragraphs or whatever
you're using to enclose each quotation).

One "hack" that I have used for a series of short sections
of text (let's say, quotations) is to put each quotation
into a one-row table, one table per quotation.  Many ebook
programs will try to display the entire table on the same
page, thus avoiding, or at least reducing the number of,
widows and orphans.

If you were using <p> elements, change <p> to 

  <table border='0'><tr><td>

and change </p> to

  </td></tr></table>

You might be able to "get away" with one quotation per
table row, since many rendering programs will also try to
keep all of the contents of a table row on the same page.
Again, it depends on the ebook programs.  If you take this
approach, be sure to not have any super-long tables since
many rendering programs will get "sluggish" with very long
tables.

--Ernest


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