Re: widows vs orphans

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-06-15T13:41:38-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> Although Wikipedia says there's no agreement on the definitions of
> "widow" and "orphan"
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans), web research has
> led me to conclude that there's a stronger consensus than Wikipedia
> credits: that orphans are at page bottom and widows at page top.

This convention is difficult for me to internalize.

> As two data points, these are the definitions used by typography
> expert Robert Bringhurst (as quoted long ago on this list by Steve
> Izma (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2004-03/msg00091.html), himself a
> knowledgeable and experienced typographer),

I have his book and started to read it.  The early material has interest
but is not of utility to me as a groff developer.  Perhaps my organs of
artistic appreciation are withered and insensitive.

> and are the ones assumed by the -ms parameter names PORPHANS and
> HORPHANS, which control bottom-of-page line allotment.

Also true.

> This part of commit 78b4d92c4, on the other hand, introduced text in
> the groff info manual a couple weeks ago using the opposite
> definitions:
> 
> > +@cindex widow
> > +We can require space for at least the first two output lines of a
> > +paragraph, preventing its first line from being @slanted{widowed} at the
> > +page bottom.
> 
> What do our resident typographers regard as a widow and an orphan?

For those who couldn't guess, the new language here is from me, so I
wear the blame.

At 2023-06-15T15:10:41-0400, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> Without wanting to be presscriptive about something so touchy, I
> learned the following when I was an apprentice typesetter: "Widows
> have no future and orphans have no past."

If "future" and "past" mean "words {after, before} them on the page",
then I find this mnemonic intuitive and easy to retain.

I'd hesitate to add it to our official documentation for cultural
reasons.[1]

> A single word at the bottom of the page has no "future" words
> afterwards; a single word at the top of the page has no "past" words
> preceding it.

Exactly.

Strangely, though, I've had a habit (I think only in commit messages) of
referring to the stranding of a single word at the _beginning_ of a
line, as with "reasons" above, as "orphaning" it.  Not sure why my brain
did that.  Maybe I should amend my uses to say "stranding" in this case.

And perhaps that points the way to a less troublesome analogy.

Perhaps we could employ terms like "forward stranding" and "backward
stranding"?  Though I foresee difficulties there, to, depending on
whether one identifies the thing being stranded as the smaller portion
of the text or the greater one.  _My_ intuition would be toward the
smaller, as "stranding" implies, to me, separation from a larger body,
but as we've seen, my intuition is sometimes capricious.

Regards,
Branden

[1] It seems to imply a patriarchal view of a woman's utility after
    marriage.  Since at least my first decade of life, the invariably
    empowering and liberating consequences of disposing of one's male
    spouse or partner has been a recurring theme of entertainment (it
    fueled a U.S. cable network dedicated wholly to the premise).

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