Avoiding widows and orphans in LaTeX documents

To avoid paragraphs ending with a single line on the following page often looks a bit ugly. Especially when they are then followed by figures or tables. Single lines of a page-overlapping paragraph are called “widows” and “orphans”. How can we tell TeX to avoid those? With the following code, you tell TeX that it should put a penalty on these types of layouts. Setting this penalty very high (typically 10.000) avoids widows and orphans almost entirely. Just add the following code in the preamble of your document.

\clubpenalty = 10000
\widowpenalty = 10000 \displaywidowpenalty = 10000

Leave a Reply