Re: [css-text] Preventing typographic orphans

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Lea Verou <lea@verou.me> 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?
>

I've seen lots of different ways of defining a rule for short last
lines. Our standard is for the last line of a paragraph to be at least
as long as the paragraph indent. It's fairly common to specify a
minimum number of characters (often 5, not including punctuation) on
the last line. If the last word of the paragraph is twenty letters
long, having it alone on the last line is rarely a problem! And people
often want to prevent the last word of a paragraph from hyphenating.

As always with these adjustments, my major concern is with what
happens to the rest of the paragraph. I'd be much more comfortable
with a property for this if we also had more control over
minimum/optimum/maximum spacing in justified text, etc.

Dave