You can eliminate orphans and widows, words or single lines of text that become separated from the other lines in a paragraph. Orphans fall at the bottom of a column or page, and widows fall at the top of a column or page. Another typographic problem to avoid is a heading that stands alone on a page with the following paragraph on the next page. You have several options for fixing widows, orphans, short exit lines, and other paragraph break problems:

Discretionary hyphens

A discretionary hyphen (Type > Insert Special Character > Hyphens And Dashes > Discretionary Hyphen) appears only if the word breaks. This option prevents the common typographic problem of hyphenated words, such as “care-giver,” appearing in the middle of a line after text reflows. Similarly, you can also add a discretionary line break character.

No Break

Choose No Break from the Character panel menu to prevent selected text from breaking across a line.

Nonbreaking spaces

Insert a nonbreaking space (Type > Insert White Space > [nonbreaking space]) between words you want to keep together.

Keep Options

Choose Keep Options from the Paragraph panel menu to specify how many lines in the following paragraph remain with the current paragraph.

Start Paragraph

Use Start Paragraph in the Keep Options dialog box to force a paragraph (usually a title or heading) to appear at the top of a page, column, or section. This option works especially well as part of a heading paragraph style.

Hyphenation Settings

Choose Hyphenation from the Paragraph panel menu to change hyphenation settings.

Edit text

Editing text may not be an option depending on the kind of document you work with. If you have license to rewrite, then subtle rewording can often create a better line break.

Use a different composer

In general, use Adobe Paragraph Composer to let InDesign compose paragraphs automatically. If a paragraph isn’t composed the way you’d like, choose Adobe Single-line Composer from the Paragraph panel menu or Control panel menu and adjust selected lines individually.