Page, column and line breaks

When you divide your document into pages or columns, make sure that the page breaks occur at the right places.¹

1. The last line of a paragraph should not appear at the top of a page.²

2. The last line of a paragraph should be more than 5 characters.

3. Avoid a short word that begins a sentence falling at the end of a line.

4. A heading at the foot of a page must be followed by at least 3 text lines.

5. A page must not end with a hyphenated word.

Most typography apps have settings that avoid bad page breaks (look for ‘keep with next’, or ‘keep lines together’). But don’t rely on them – proof-read for bad breaks just as you do for spelling mistakes.

Unfortunate hyphenations

Watch out for line breaks that split a long word into two short ones that change the sense. Automatic hyphenation uses dictionaries to avoid this, but it can happen if they are set to the wrong language. So ‘therapist’ can become ‘the-rapist’, ‘legends’, ‘leg-ends’, or ‘weeknights’, wee-knights’.

Disruptive patterns

You should always use hyphenation with justified type, but make sure no more than two lines in a row end with a hyphen. That’s sometimes called a ‘ladder’.

Do not allow two lines in a row to start with the same few words.

Watch out for rivers – if too many word spaces are vertically aligned, your eye connects them and you see white lines known as rivers. They are worse with justified type because it will include lines with extra wide spaces. You can sometimes cure rivers by adjusting line breaks using hyphenation.

All these rules are hard to control with digital text flowed into a template. But most of them are not a problem where digital pages flow on without page breaks.

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1. This is based on a list drawn up by Paul Luna in course materials for the University of Reading.

2. Bad page breaks used to be termed ‘widows and orphans’. The terms are discouraged these days as they depict widow and orphans as problems. And in case no one could remember which was which.