Orphan/Widow scontrol wins out over page break settings?

nickatwork · Post by **nickatwork** » Tue Nov 15, 2011 3:06 am

Hi all,
Just started building some new PDFs and I've noticed some of my <li> blocks are now breaking the pages with only a few lines - it looks to be down to widow/orphan control which I haven't messed with, its just set to the default 2 lines.
Question is, does widow/orphan control over rule the page break settings that I use? I dont want an <li> to break a page, EVER, but once Flare takes orphan control into account, then it does break them. Really annoying.
any tips?

Thanks,
Nick

whunter · Post by **whunter** » Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:16 am

Does that li tag have a paragraph within it? If so, that may account for why "some" are doing it and some aren't.

That said, I'm using 6.1, and I think that the widow/orphan feature (for PDF at least) is so bad as to be worthless. I have submitted several items which MadCap has logged as bugs, which to my knowledge are not fixed in 7. I guess my point is (other than just venting

that I'm not confident that messing with the widow/orphan settings will solve any problems.

nickatwork · Post by **nickatwork** » Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:49 am

Yeah the <li> tags have <p> tags within them. but this shouldn't be messing with it. The orphan/widow stuff is set in the <body> tag but then the page-break control is set in the <li> tags.
It is really frustrating, and I'm sure didnt used to happen like this, I've tried messing with all sorts of stuff and it just doesnt make a difference, apart from forcing page breaks and manual orphan/widow settings where its occurring I cant change squat.
I wish I could just disable/delete it entirely. MadCap should have an option for that, I can control my paragraphs etc myself using page breaks, so let me do it!
Rah, theres the rant, no more. Maybe I'll open a ticket for MadCap if I can find some consistency with this problem.

Nick

helen · Post by **helen** » Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:08 am

I came across this today as well. My orphan control appears to be trampling all over my group together DIV. I'm going to rase a feature request / bug support. It's only in rare instances but yes, not helpful!

nickatwork · Post by **nickatwork** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 1:57 am

Yeah I've already sent a sample project to MadCap, hopefully they get back to me with a solution. Ill let you know how I get on.

Glahe · Post by **Glahe** » Thu Oct 18, 2012 12:41 pm

nickatwork wrote:Yeah I've already sent a sample project to MadCap, hopefully they get back to me with a solution. Ill let you know how I get on.

Almost a year after your last post, have you (or MadCap) resolved this issue?

I now have a problem where widow/orphan control is not working in a <li> tag where the element contains less than two lines of text. In the printed output, Flare has placed one word on the verso page.

I'm not sure how to fix this. Does anyone have a suggestion?

sfoley · Post by **sfoley** » Thu Oct 18, 2012 12:47 pm

Glahe wrote:I now have a problem where widow/orphan control is not working in a <li> tag where the element contains less than two lines of text. In the printed output, Flare has placed one word on the verso page.

It's hard to recommend a fix without more information about your current styles. Can you paste relevant sections of your stylesheet?

As an example, what I do is specify the short-line property for all elements...

Code: Select all

* {
    mc-hyphenate: never;
    mc-short-line-method: tighten-loosen;
    mc-short-line: 4;
}

And then add pagination and widow/orphan rules for only specific elements:

Code: Select all

h1,h2,h3,h4,th,p.TOC1,p.ListItem {
    page-break-after: avoid;
}

p,td,ol,ul {
    orphans: 3;
    widows: 3;
}

li {
    page-break-inside: avoid;
}

By only specifying widow/orphan and pagination rules for specific elements, I find I run into fewer problems. Ultimately, though, you have to let a few problems slip through in each document ... unless you want to manually paginate every time you build. :(

Glahe · Post by **Glahe** » Thu Oct 18, 2012 5:29 pm

Thank you SFoley. We have widow/orphan control set at the body level and at several levels below that (ol, ul, ol ul, ol ol, and so on).

We are not using the short-line property, and I didn't know about it. Now, I'll experiment, and see how it works out.

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Orphan/Widow scontrol wins out over page break settings?

Orphan/Widow scontrol wins out over page break settings?

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