Re: Adjusting column width dynamically to get rid of orphans and widows

[Thomas Widmann <thomas@complexli.com>]

On 24 June 2017 at 01:19, Henri Menke <henrimenke@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> How about putting every entry into a box, making it unbreakable?  Of course, you get unbalanced
> columns this way, but I think keeping the entries together is easier for the reader.

Thanks for your suggestion, but I don't think that'd work. Firstly,
it'd require you to figure out whether an entry is longer than three
lines (and thus breakable) before putting it into a box.  Secondly,
unbalanced columns really aren't the done thing in dictionary
publishing.

Lots of published dictionaries are full of orphans and widows because
they're so hard to avoid without a lot of manual intervention, which
is why I'm keen to explore and novel ways to avoid them.

However, all ways I can think of requires typesetting the entries in
the last column multiple times, i.e.:

repeat
  adjust parameters (column width, looseness, ...)
  typeset column
until the column doesn't generate orphan/widow

Is this possible with ConTeXt/LuaTeX?

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Widmann
Director
Complexli Limited
+44 789 444 3009
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