HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
8.4.13.5. Controlling widows and orphans
In typographic lingo,
orphans
are those lines of a paragraph stranded at
the bottom of a page due to a page break, and
widows
are those lines
remaining at the top of a page following a page break. Generally, prin-
ted pages do not look attractive with single lines of text stranded at the
top or bottom. Most printers try to leave at least two or more lines of
text at the top or bottom of each page.
If you want to take control of this behavior, you can apply the
widows
and
orphans
properties to an element. The value of each property is the
minimum number of lines of text that can be left at the top or bottom of
the page, respectively. The default is 2, meaning that the browser gen-
erates page breaks as needed to ensure that at least two lines of text
from the element appear at the top or bottom of each page. You gener-
ally want to apply this property to all of the elements in your document,
to ensure consistent pagination throughout.
