Re: [css-text] Preventing typographic orphans

I'm not sure "insert nonbreaking spaces as necessary" is such a
terrible answer, honestly.  TeX expects you to do just that, so
more-sophisticated yet language-blind algorithms aren't going to help
by themselves. And it seems to me that even with language-sensitive
word-wrapping rules it would be very difficult to get an 100%
automated solution.

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Alan Stearns <stearns@adobe.com> wrote:
> On 1/3/15, 3:47 PM, "Randy Edmunds" <redmunds@adobe.com> wrote:
>
>>> In typography, orphans are lone words at the end of a line. However, in
>>>CSS, the orphans property controls the minimum number of lines in a
>>>block container that must be left at the bottom of a page, not the
>>>minimum number of words at the end of a line. Is there anything planned
>>>for typographic orphans? If not, why?
>>>
>>> This must have been discussed before, but can't seem to find it, sorry.
>>
>>There has been talk of a `text-balance` property that takes a percentage
>>value. The value determines the minimum length for the last line of a
>>paragraph, compared to the average line length. The property defaults to
>>auto which computes to 0% (the last line can be anywhere from 0-100% of
>>the average line length). If the text-balance property computes to 100%,
>>then all of the lines in the paragraph get balanced to give the last line
>>full width.
>>
>>Randy
>
> Right - search for ‘last line length’ rather than ‘orphans’ to find the
> discussion. I think it’s probably a separate concern than balanced lines
> [1], as you can fiddle with more things than line endings to achieve the
> last line length you want. It might require something closer to multi-line
> composition to correctly automate last line length, though.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alan
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Oct/0256.html
>

Received on Sunday, 4 January 2015 01:13:46 UTC