"Prevent widowed last lines" not working in Publisher

[dantaylr]

Please let me know if I'm missing something but the "Prevent widowed last lines" checkbox in the paragraph styles settings doesn't seem to do what it says.

 

[walt.farrell]

None of those settings applies in this case. Widowed Last Lines prevents the last line of a paragraph from appearing by itself in the next frame.

[dantaylr]

18 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

None of those settings applies in this case. Widowed Last Lines prevents the last line of a paragraph from appearing by itself in the next frame.

Walt, thanks for the clarification. Are you aware if there is any setting to prevent widows?

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, dantaylr said:

Walt, thanks for the clarification. Are you aware if there is any setting to prevent widows?

As Walt’s response implies, you’re not dealing with a widow here. If you want the last word of that sentence to move up to the previous line, you need to widen the text frame or reduce the tracking.

[walt.farrell]

If Publisher had a paragraph-based composition/layout function, it could perhaps automatically try to adjust Tracking and try to prevent your situation. It doesn't.

So, as Alfred said, for this one I think you're on your own to reword, or adjust the frame size, adjust the text size, or adjust the tracking yourself.

[dantaylr]

Ah actually what I'm thinking is the classic process of soft-returning the previous word so that at least two words end up on the last line rather than a tracking adjustment. I believe this is a feature that can be turned on in InDesign, as I remember previously using it.