Widow/orphan control not working

[Mary]

I'm using Word 2003 on Windows XP. For some time, widow/orphan control has
not been working in documents based on our corporate templates. If text (and
styles) is copied from a document based on one of these templates into a
document based on Normal.dot, then the text behaves as it should, i.e.,
widow/orphan works as expected.

When I previously posted this question a few months ago, it was suggested
that the issue might be having too many paragraphs formatted "keep with
next." That is not the case as this happens with just a page or two of text
with no special paragraph formatting. However, I'm now fairly sure that the
problem is being caused by a frame in the footer. The footers of all these
templates are set up in such a way that there is some text on the left and
on the right there is a frame containing the company logo and some
additional text (copyright notice, page number and date). The frame appears
to be aligned with the right margin and the top of the header area. However,
if the frame is deleted, the text behaves itself, i.e., widow/orphan works.

Since I don't own the templates, it's not an option for me to revise all of
them by removing the frames in the footer. But is there something in the
frame formatting that could be changed so it doesn't interfere with the text
on the page? The frame is formatted as follows: 2.5 inches high, 1.18 inches
wide, horizontal position right relative to margin, distance from text 0.13
inches, vertical position 9.83 inches relative to margin, distance from text
0 inches. Move with text and lock anchor are unchecked. Document margins set
to one inch on all sides and paper size is US letter.

My workaround to date has been to used Keep Lines Together to prevent ugly
paragraph breaks, but this is time-consuming in long documents and looks bad
in long paragraphs.Any suggestions please.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I can confirm the issue. It seems that Word just isn't up to calculating
where the page breaks fall when the line width changes between one page and
the next. I've learned to live with it in the few templates I have that use
frames or text boxes this way.

 

[Mary]

Thanks Suzanne.

I'm not sure what it means when you say "when the line width changes between
one page and the next."

Are you saying that widow/orphan control is always an issue when frames are
used in footers or also when they are used on the page too? The earlier
versions of these templates used a single row, two-column table in the
footer to create a left and right pane. That seemed to work pretty well, but
when the templates were revised, the owner said that the table in the footer
was problematic for some autotext entries associated with the footer, so it
was replaced by the footers with frames.

How would you set up a replacement footer that would accomodate what are
like two text blocks, one on the left, one on the right? I think part of the
problem with the table approach or just using a right-aligned tab in the
footer style was that it doesn't automatically adapt when a landscape page
is inserted.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In my case I have a text box down the left side of the page creating an
artificially wide left margin on just the first page, which results in a
different line length on page 1 from page 2 (for an example, see the "More
complex letterhead" illustration at
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/Letterhead.htm).

If your frame is entirely in the footer area, this should not cause a
problem. If the footer margin is not large enough to accommodate the frame,
I can see that this might have an effect.

A lot of people do use the table setup (I have never needed it); if you set
the table width to 100%, perhaps it would adapt to landscape pages?

Whether you use tabs or a table, given that you have to have section breaks
around landscape pages anyway, you can unlink the header/footer and change
the table width or tab stops or even apply a Landscape Header/Footer style.

 

[Mary]

It looks as though the frame is completely in the footer area. While I'm in
the footer, it seems that it is positioned so that the top aligns with the
bottom of the page text and the right edge aligns with the right margin.
However, when I close the footer and return to print layout, the top border
of the frame appears to project every so slightly (about 1 mm) above the
dotted line that seems to mark the upper reaches of the footer area. I
should say that I have text boundaries turned on.

Now the more I look at this the more confused I am about how the margins and
footer areas are defined. Margins all around are 1 inches, and headers and
footers are both set to 0.4 inches. However, the stuff in the footer area
certainly is much taller than the 0.6 inch allowance. And the frame is
actually 1.18 inches tall, so it is in fact pushing into the bottom of the
page proper.

If I reduce the height of the frame to 1 inches or even 1.1 inches it would
fix the w-o issue but leave me with a badly positioned frame, which I have
no clue how to fix. Frames are so weird to me. I don't even know where they
come from.

I find that if I increase the bottom margin from 1 inch to 1.18 inches,
widow/orphan works. But I'm still puzzled as to why the footer area can seem
to accommodate more text than the difference between the margin (1 inch) and
footer (0.4 inch from edge of page) would seem to suggest. It seems that the
1 inch margin is an "at least" rather than an exact value.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Header and footer text *does* displace document text when it exceeds the
difference between the header/footer margin and the top/bottom margin. You
can capitalize on this to have "different" margins on the first page of a
section (by using the "Different first page" setting and increasing the size
of the First Page Header/Footer). In this case, I think the problem arises
from having the frame extending into only part of the document area. If you
add Space Above to the text in the footer to raise the margin to the height
of the top of the frame all the way across, your document text won't wrap
around the frame, but you also won't have the widow/orphan problem.