Widows, orphans and page breaks

A page has to end somewhere, and where it ends is a compromise. These settings decide which compromise the book makes.

The words

Orphan — the first line of a paragraph, left alone at the foot of a page.

Widow — the last line of a paragraph, carried alone to the top of the next page.

Both look like mistakes to a reader, who sees a line that has lost its paragraph.

Layout mode

Mode	Prefers	Costs
Widows and orphans	Never stranding a line	Facing pages may end at different depths
Balanced pages	Two facing pages ending level	An occasional stranded line
Hybrid	A compromise	Facing pages may differ by a line or two

Widows and orphans is the default and the right answer for a novel: a reader notices a stranded line far more than an uneven spread.

Balanced pages suits a book read across the spread — a photo book, a textbook, anything where two facing pages are looked at as one object.

Hybrid allows facing pages to differ by up to the spread tolerance you set, in lines, and uses that room to avoid a bad break.

Widows and orphans values

Both range 1 to 5, default 2.

The value is the minimum number of lines that may be left behind or carried forward. At 2, a paragraph will not leave a single line at the foot of a page, nor carry a single line to the top of the next.

Raising it to 3 makes the typesetting stricter and pushes more lines onto later pages, which makes the book slightly longer.

Keeping things together

Two rules the engine applies without a setting:

Keep with next — a heading is never the last thing on a page. Every heading style carries this.

Keep together — a composed block (a recipe, a sidebar) is not split across a page boundary.

Where chapters start

Setting	Result
The next right-hand page	The convention for a bound book. Leaves a blank verso when it has to
The next left-hand page
The next page	Either side, whichever comes first
Straight after the last one	No page break at all

Right-hand openings produce blank pages, and that is correct for a printed book — it is why the screen PDF drops them.

A single chapter can override the book’s setting from the Chapter panel in the writing rail.

Footnotes

Two settings, because print and ebooks are different objects:

Setting	Options
In print	At the foot of the page · end of the chapter · end of the book · in the text
In ebooks	Same four

At the foot of the page is what a footnote means on paper. It is not available in a reflowable ebook in any meaningful sense — there is no fixed page for it to sit at the foot of — so an EPUB gets a note the reader opens in place, or an endnote.

A note is split between pages only at a line boundary, never mid-line.

Vertical justification

Off by default. Feathering stretches the line spacing slightly to make a short page reach the bottom margin.

Use it only where pages must end level and you have accepted uneven leading as the price — a reference book set across spreads. In a novel it is visible, and worse than an uneven page bottom.