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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: LaTeX: widow lines
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.212743.20145@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 91 21:27:43 GMT
References: <2302@borg.cs.unc.edu>
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Organization: UIUC Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
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alexande@grover.cs.unc.edu (Geoffrey D. Alexander) writes:

>Is there a general way to avoid widow lines in LaTeX?  In particular, I would
>like to avoid a single line followed by display math at the top of a page.
>Also, having the display math at the top the page is not vaiable soltion; I
>would rather have two lines of text followed by the display math.

Hm. This question once again shows that Lamport doesn't
treat the TeX primitives in his book sufficiently.
Comment in general for LaTeX users:
buy the TeX book too, for more info on math and such.

The above question can be answered as follows:
the parameters \widowpenalty and \displaywidowpenalty
control exactly the two phenomena described.
Currently they are 150 and 50 respectively,
try setting them to 1000 or so. If you set them
to 10000 TeX will absolutely never break in these
places, which may be a bit too rigorous.

Victor.