The other day, I found myself telling B. that I was going to "fix the orphan". I watched as his face shifted through what I can only describe as genuine alarm. He stared at me like I'd just said something unspeakably cruel.

Are you being deliberately cryptic, or just unintentionally harsh? "In programming, we don't say insensitive stuff like that," he said, with the kind of moral certainty that only comes from someone who's never had to wrangle a particularly stubborn page layout at 2 AM. So here I am now, feeling oddly seasoned and looking for another way to say it. Or at least a way to explain why we say it at all.

The language of typography

"Orphans," "widows," and "runts" have been floating around editorial circles for decades, maybe longer. These terms carry the weight of old publishing traditions, and while their metaphors aren't exactly gentle, they've stuck with the kind of stubborn persistence that only industry jargon can manage.

An orphan is that awkward, lonely line that gets stranded at the top of a new column or page, separated from the rest of its paragraph like a sentence that showed up to the wrong party.
A widow, on the other hand, is that short line left behind at the bottom of a paragraph or page, hanging there with nowhere to go. The last whisper of a thought that couldn't quite make it to safety.
The term runt refers to the last word (or part of a word) that breaks to a new line at the end of a paragraph. Runts are often mistakenly called widows or orphans, but they're their own particular breed of typographic disruption. The scrappy little troublemakers of the text world.

The metaphors are, I'll admit, not sensitive at all. But sometimes the language we inherit carries more history than heart, and here we are, still using words that feel a bit uncomfortable in our mouths.

Short animation showing automated ways of fixing these undesirable layout issues.

Why this matters

Learning to spot orphans, widows, and runts (and more importantly, learning to fix them) has become something of a quiet rite of passage for anyone working with text-heavy layouts. It's one of those details that separates thoughtful design from the kind that just gets the job done. The difference between good and great often lives in these small, almost invisible adjustments.

It's the kind of thing that makes you feel like you've been let in on a secret when you first learn it. One day text is just text, and the next day you're seeing these tiny disruptions everywhere, understanding instinctively why that page feels just slightly off, why your eye catches on something without quite knowing what.

Here's something worth noting: while widows and runts are both undesirable layout issues, they're not the same thing. Widows are relatively rare in European publishing traditions, where different spacing conventions tend to prevent them naturally. Runts, however, are everywhere—though what exactly constitutes a "runt" can be surprisingly subjective, depending on who you ask and what style guide they swear by.

The practical side

Fortunately, publishing software like InDesign makes these fixes more manageable than they once were. These programs have built-in capabilities to prevent lines from becoming separated at the beginning and end of paragraphs, though you'll most likely still need to make manual adjustments on a case-by-case basis. InDesign can do an excellent job of resolving runts automatically using GREP Styles, though this requires a bit more initial setup (and perhaps a small prayer to the typography gods).

Fixing widows and orphans in InDesign

The process is refreshingly straightforward:

1. Double-click the Paragraph Style you need to modify in the Paragraph Styles panel.

2. Navigate to the 'Keep Options' section of the dialog box.

3. Check the box next to 'Keep Lines Together'.

The default setting will force InDesign to keep the first and last two lines together (adjustable as needed), making it technically impossible for widows or orphans to occur. The trade-off, of course, is that this will cause two lines to break across columns and pages instead of just one, which may create its own set of problems. A gentle reminder that in design, as in life, every solution brings its own complications.

Understanding runts

While runts aren't overly disruptive to the reading experience in a block of text, they can make the overall appearance of type look untidy. They contribute to white-space problems (those distracting "rivers" that snake through text like unwanted waterways) and can create awkward gaps between the end of a paragraph and an indented new line when there isn't enough horizontal overlap.

Fixing runts with GREP styles

This process requires a bit more finesse, but it's worth the effort:

1. Create a new Character Style and go to the 'Basic Character Formats' section

2. Check the box for 'No Break'

3. Save and close the Character Style dialog

4. Open your Paragraph Style and navigate to the 'GREP Style' section

5. Click 'New GREP Style'

6. Select your new Character Style from the 'Apply Style' drop-down

7. Enter this GREP string: \<(\s?(\S+)){2}$ into the 'To Text' field

Save and close, then watch as InDesign works its quiet magic

The bigger picture

These small typographic considerations might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but they're part of what makes reading a pleasure rather than a chore. They're the invisible infrastructure that supports clear communication—the kind of behind-the-scenes work that nobody notices when it's done well, but everyone feels when it's missing.

In our digital age, where text flows across countless screen sizes and devices, these old rules have become both more complex and more important. What looks perfect on a desktop might create orphans and widows on a tablet. What flows beautifully in one browser might break apart awkwardly in another. We're constantly chasing these moving targets, trying to maintain that sense of visual harmony across an endless array of contexts.

So now, when someone inevitably tells you to "fix the orphan," you'll know exactly what they mean. Maybe you'll find a gentler way to describe it? I believe that noticing these small disruptions and caring about fixing them isn't pedantic at all. It's an act of consideration for every person who will encounter our work, a small kindness embedded in the very structure of how we present words to the world.

Other things:

Quick copy-paste “To Text” GREP: \<(\s?(\S+)){2}$

An act of consideration