Inserting Objects creates Widows/Orphans

[Colin Higbie]

Widow and Orphan control works great if there is just text in a document (on
Word 2003 on Windows XP, all service packs applied to both Word and
Windows). However, if I paste a graphic on a page near the bottom, the
paragraph that ends adjacent to that object or wraps around it seems to
ignore its No Widow/Orphan settings and leave single isolated lines.

Why is this?

Is there a way to prevent it? Is there a way to fix it without finding each
and every such occurrence in a large document with lots of pictures?

Thanks,
Colin

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Colin,

I don't think there's much you can do about this, short of not using text
wrapping. Text wrap just seems to throw off Word's more exacting page layout
features. You could try whether placing the object in a FRAME (from the Forms
toolbar) gives a better result. Frames are interpreted differently than other
types of objects, and Word often behaves better with them (and sometimes not).

Widow and Orphan control works great if there is just text in a document (on
Word 2003 on Windows XP, all service packs applied to both Word and
Windows). However, if I paste a graphic on a page near the bottom, the
paragraph that ends adjacent to that object or wraps around it seems to
ignore its No Widow/Orphan settings and leave single isolated lines.

Why is this?

Is there a way to prevent it? Is there a way to fix it without finding each
and every such occurrence in a large document with lots of pictures?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Bob S]

I don't think there's much you can do about this, short of not using text
wrapping. Text wrap just seems to throw off Word's more exacting page layout
features. You could try whether placing the object in a FRAME (from the Forms
toolbar) gives a better result. Frames are interpreted differently than other
types of objects, and Word often behaves better with them (and sometimes not).

If you think that there is someone at Microsoft who would like to fix
the bug of poor widow/orphan control around wrapped objects at the
bottom of the page, tell them that the cause is probably that the
calculation of how many lines are occupied on the second page is using
the width of the paragraph on the first page, which is made narrow by
the wrapped object, rather than the actual wider width available on
the second page. Thus while Word is laying out the first page it looks
to Word as though there will be two narrow lines on the second page
when in fact there will be one wide line.

Doing the calculation correctly would require knowing exactly how much
width is actually available on the second page. The full calculation
is probably too complex, for several reasons.

If Word were to assume that the width on the second page was full
margin width, rather than assuming that the width was the narrow
post-wrapped-object width, it would be subject to a different error.
In particular, if the second page had some other wrapped object at the
top, Word might place more lines than necessary on the second page.
This would probably be less noticeable than the current problem of
placing only one line on the second page.

Bob S

 

[Colin Higbie]

I don't think that was the problem in my case. All of my graphics were full
width (no text beside them), and all of my text was too. I had been using
above and below only as the wrapping option.

In the end, I switched to inline graphics and solved the vast majority of my
problems.

- Colin