Widows and orphans

[acoosemans]

Hi,

We are using Arbortext Styler 7 and I am confused by the result of the widow and orphan settings.

It seems to work for paragraphs and tables. But I can't get it to work for other elements.

For instance, I added the rule on the element "bulletedlist" which has "listitem" as children, which in turn has "para" and the likes. I want a rule on the bulletedlist to keep at least two listitems together. I have several similar cases where I want to add a widow/orphan rule on a parent element.

Am I doing something wrong, or do I need to add a feature request in the idea section of this community?

[GarethOakes · Accepted solution]

I don't think lists have exactly what you're looking for. Each list item contains one or more paragraphs, so the best you could achieve is to use keeps to keep paragraphs with each other. For example you could say the first list item paragraph keeps-with-next, and the last last item paragraph keeps-with-previous. Not perfect, but perhaps something you could work with to automate away most of the issue?

[acoosemans]

Thanks for your reply Gareth, much appreciated!

Your suggestion could work in some cases, but not for all.

For instance, a procedure is always numbererd in our case, where the numbers resemble steps in the procedure. Some procedures are so simple that they have only one step. If I would apply your suggested rule here, I would keep this step together with any element that happens to follow it, which is not desired.

I could of course extend the rule with more conditions (e.g. check the number of siblings).

I prefer to keep the stylesheet definition as simple as possible for maintenance reasons.

So, although there seems to be a workaround, I prefer not apply it.

[GarethOakes]

Sure, understood, I can't think of any other features in Arbortext that would help with this requirement.