Adjust spacing and hyphenation settings.
Use Illustrator’s spacing and hyphenation settings to prevent single words from appearing at the start or end of a page or column. For example, you could adjust character spacing so that the last word of a paragraph returns to the previous page.
Manually edit your text.
Reword or modify your content to avoid awkward line breaks. Sometimes changing a word like “extroverted” to “outgoing” could shorten the text enough to prevent a widow or orphan.
Use non-breaking spaces or special characters.
In Illustrator, access the Glyph panel to insert a non-breaking space (Alt+0160 on Windows, Option+Space on Mac). This keeps specific words together, ensuring they don’t split across lines.
Fine-tune text with Optical Margin Alignment.
Illustrator’s Optical Margin Alignment helps align text edges more precisely, potentially reducing widows and orphans. You can find this setting in the Story panel.
If you’re still struggling with orphans and widows after trying the above, try tweaking your column width, margins, or page layout to adjust how text flows.
