# What are widows and orphans in typesetting?

A widow is the last line of a paragraph left alone at the top of a new page. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph left alone at the bottom of a page. Both break the reading rhythm, so typesetters keep at least two lines of a paragraph together on each side of a page break.

Last reviewed 30 October 2026. Web page: https://chapbook.ink/glossary/widow-and-orphan/

## What it means in practice

In a Word document, you fix these with the paragraph setting for widow and orphan control, or by editing a line or two so the break falls somewhere else. A book with fixed pages needs the check again after any late edit, since one added line can move every page break after it.

The usual cost of the fix is a page that ends a line short at the bottom.

## How Chapbook uses it

Chapbook typesets its PDFs and paperback interiors with Typst. Typst's documentation says text layout prevents widows and orphans by default, and Chapbook's theme keeps that default, so a paragraph that would leave one line on the next page takes a second line with it.

The preflight report under a paperback doesn't flag these, since the layout already avoids them. A [reflowable](/glossary/reflowable/) EPUB is laid out by the reader's app, and a Word document follows your word processor's settings.

## Made with Chapbook: Slow Money

Slow Money: What a family bakery taught me about pricing, patience and staying small, by Rosa Almeida. Nonfiction book, 9,273 words, 37 pages. A sample generated from one brief and exported unedited; it is not a customer's book. Read every page: https://chapbook.ink/examples/bakery/

The brief:

> Twenty years of running a two-shop family bakery: the decisions about price, growth and hours that kept it small and solvent. Promise: A clear-eyed account of how a small business stays small on purpose, with the numbers and rules of thumb that made it work. Reader: A small-business owner weighing a second location, a price rise, or a loan. Voice: First person, narrative chapters that each end with what the author would tell a friend; a fictional family, bakery and town; no invented statistics beyond the bakery's own illustrative numbers.

The outline the planner proposed:

1. Prologue: The Second Oven (585 words)
2. The First Price Rise (1,250 words)
3. The Loan We Did Not Take (1,101 words)
4. The Second Shop, and Why Not a Third (1,186 words)
5. Hours, and the Cost of Being Open (1,085 words)
6. The Wholesale Account We Let Go (1,142 words)
7. Hiring Family and Paying Them Properly (1,216 words)
8. What the Numbers Said Each January (1,179 words)
9. Epilogue: Small on Purpose (478 words)

## Questions

### Which is the widow and which is the orphan?

A widow is the last line of a paragraph at the top of a page, alone on the next page. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page. Style guides discourage both.

### Can a Chapbook EPUB have widows?

An EPUB has no fixed pages, so the reading app decides where each page breaks. Chapbook's protection applies to the fixed pages of its PDFs.

## Sources

- [Typst documentation, the text function’s “costs” parameter](https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text/)