Supportsoft Glossary

Handling Orphans and Widows

Orphans and widows are isolated words or lines that appear at the beginning or end of a text column. Correcting them is vital for a polished layout. 

In typography, "orphans" and "widows" are those awkward typographic hiccups that break the reading flow. A widow is a lone word sitting by itself at the end of a paragraph (or the top of a new column). An orphan is a single line of a paragraph left behind at the bottom of a page.

They create ugly patches of white space and interrupt the reader's rhythm. On the web, where screen sizes change constantly, these are hard to fight. But for static docs or PDFs, we manually fix them—usually by tweaking the tracking slightly or rewriting the copy to pull a word back or push one down. It’s a small detail that makes the text look "typeset" rather than just "typed."