It does take a special sort of person to advocate the killing of all widows and orphans. Until Glen of NEID Printing gave us the 1978 reference I had assumed orphans were a Quark thang. They give three entries for the widow and nowhere do they describe the orphan.
#WIDOWS AND ORPHANS IN WRITING MANUAL#
There is still no better manual for book preparation. Your question sent me to Words into Type, third edition (Marjorie Skillin and Robert Gay, Prentice-Hall, 1974). But "orphan" was not the only neologism I discovered while learning QXP's controls - there was also "tracking", and that, I was certain, ought to have been called "letterspacing". And a coworker who claimed to have been a typographer at Foote Cone & Belding made my crest fall even more by carrying on as if orphan-control were SOP at the ad agencies. That made me a bit crestfallen because I thought I had learned everything by then. The first time I encountered the term "orphan" was in the typographical controls of Quark XPress v2. In a third post, Wm reported, "A Composition Manual (PIA, 1953) doesn't even mention either topic, though given the typographic standards of the era, perhaps that's no small surprise." The editors do note the term in use among English printers the Dutch called it a Whore's Son." I would add that the Dutch usage may be what gave rise to the confusion between widows and orphans in Gregg, et seq. Nothing before 1978 on orphans yet.įurther update: Wm Voss, a printer in California who still sets foundry type in a composing stick, bless him, went digging in his library and reported the following: "Both practices are described and condemned in Van Winkle (1818), Savage (1841), and MacKellar (1885), but none use the terms." He subsequently reported: "A Widow is also described in Moxon, but not by term. Late news, courtesy of a fellow going by the handle "Character" over on : A 1904 citation for "widdies" and a 1932 citation for "widows" in typography manuals. Okay, folks, see how citation works? Good job, Glen! Now, can anyone else push it back further? See also widow." -Glen NEID Printing Groton, CT 06340 An orphan is an indication of poor layout and should be avoided. "orphan: In copy layout and page makeup, a colloquial term for a word or syllable that stands alone at the top of a column or page. I was hired as a proofreader/copy editor at a small tax publisher in Nassau County, on Long Island in New York.įrom: Glen Allvord Posted to: To: "CTP-Q, Page Layout: Adobe, Quark, MS, PDF" 2007 July 12 Graphic Arts Encyclopedia, second edition 1978, George A. I seem to remember that I first heard the expressions in early 1978, when I took my first real job.
(That’s lifetime of the blog, just to be clear.) Earliest citation wins a lifetime half-price subscription to this blog. There are at least three people who are wasting time on this question, and we’d all like to be doing something more productive. So here’s your challenge: If you can find a printed definition of or reference to orphans in a typographic context from before 1990, respond in the comments with the citation. In theory, those of us involved in this discussion are old enough to remember when we first heard the term, but we’re also old enough to imagine we heard it many years earlier than we actually heard it.įurther, looking at examples of fine printing from before 1970, pages may be devoid of widows but there seems to have been no effort to eliminate orphans, suggesting that nobody gave the notion much thought before the advent of computerized page makeup. (The latest edition of Gregg, locking the barn door after the horse is gone, has reversed course and made the correction.)īut the more interesting question that arose is this: When did the term orphan first enter typesetting argot? A few of us have been looking, and so far, we’ve found widow defined in references from before 1980, but we’ve found no references to orphan that old. As a result, a lot more people have the definitions wrong way round than have them in the traditional order. This led to Microsoft getting the definitions backwards in Microsoft Word. However, the Gregg Reference Manual, which has been the standard secretarial handbook for decades, got the definitions reversed. This is the general consensus among old-time compositors. An orphan is the opposite-the first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of the page. The original meaning of widow (in the typesetting context) is the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of a page. This raises a couple of questions, and in the course of the discussion, we resolved one of them. One of the criteria publishers often include in their specifications is “no widows or orphans.” The more criteria they specify, the more labor is required and the higher the price (no secret there). Publishers get to make choices when they are buying typesetting. I got into an interesting discussion the other day about a nicety of composition.
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