Friday, January 23, 2009

Widows...

What is a widow? An Orphan?
No they are not a woman who lost her husband, or a child with out parents.
A widow is two things. One, a line of a paragraph that appears at the top of a page and two, am uncomfortably short line at the end of a paragraph. Usually a word or two short words.
An orphan is a line of a paragraph appearing at the bottom of the page. The opposite of the first definition of widow.

How do you fix these problems?
There are a few ways to fix this problem. You can try adjusting the leading (space between lines of text), adjust the tracking (space between letters), rewriting a portion of the paragraph, hyphenating words or adjusting the margins and or columns the text is in. If you are working on a newspaper, magazine, text book (for learning) you may also consider including pull quotes, or adding in an image, diagram, or figure.

Why do I bring this up?
Well, I was going though the Christmas cards my company received and I found this one card that caught my eye and made me die a little bit on the inside:

Click to enlarge

This goes along with the second definition of "widow". There is NO reason that "Year" should be on it's own line. It looks highly unprofessional and unfinished. This could have been fixed by staring a new line break:

Wishing you Peace and
happiness during the holidays
and throughout the
New Year

That wasn't hard at all. Now was it?


Definitions and information are from my knowledge and this Wikipedia page.

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The funny thing is, most "common folk" don't give a shit about any of this.

January 31, 2012 at 3:51 AM  
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December 29, 2017 at 3:01 AM  
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April 18, 2018 at 1:47 AM  

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