Law 11: Don't allow less than
seven characters on the line.
When you're formatting paragraphs of text,
sometimes a single word, or maybe a short phrase,
is going to end up as the last line of a paragraph.
It's pretty much inevitable.
Notice how this dangling word is causing
visual unbalance in our paragraph.
Because our paragraph is not sitting
on a visually stable base, it looks like
it could even just tip right over.
And besides being visually unappealing,
having just one word on this last line is also wasteful.
We've used an entire line for just our one little word.
And that's just not a good use of white space.
White space in your designs should be planned.
This is unplanned, wasted white space.
You may hear people talk about these short lines of text
or you may read something about them,
and sometimes they get referred to as 'widows,'
sometimes they get referred to as 'orphans,'
and if you start poking around, you'll see
that there are a lot of different conflicting definitions
and uses of these two terms.
There's not a lot of agreement out there on exactly
what they mean and how they're used.
But for our purposes, it doesn't really matter.
It's not all that important to unravel this confusion.
You can call it whatever you want,
just eliminate them.
A minimum of seven characters on a line of text
is a good rule of thumb,
and that's a pretty good place to start.
Keep in mind that our goal here is good visual balance
while efficiently using the space on our page.
So the exact number of characters is not all that important
as long as you're achieving this goal.
And so now you can see, we fixed the issue.
And in this example, we're using the same text as before,
but the dangling final word is no longer there.
And we fixed it by widening
our text block just a little bit.
And by doing that, by widening the text block,
we caused the text of this paragraph to re-wrap, or re-flow,
and now that final word jumped up to the previous lines.
So we no longer have our one little
dangling word at the end of our paragraph.
Widening the text block is one way to fix this issue,
but there are many other possible fixes as well.
And the solution that you choose is going to depend on
how much flexibility you have in either
changing your page design or possibly editing the text.
If you have the ability to edit the content,
this is often the best choice for long blocks of text.
By adding or modifying or even deleting a word or two,
you can usually fix the problem of dangling words.
If editing the text is not an option,
and sometimes it just may not be,
you're going to need to make some
adjustments to the document design.
And these adjustments could include things like
changing the size of the text to make it
either a little bit larger or maybe a little bit smaller.
You can also force a word to wrap down
to the next line of text, and you can do this by using
what's called a 'soft return.'
A soft return is created when you hold down the shift key
and then hit the enter key on your keyboard.
A soft return is an invisible character
and it signals the end of a line.
When you hit the enter key on your keyboard,
that's called a 'hard return,'
and that signals the end of a paragraph.
You can also insert a non-breaking space,
and a non-breaking space is a special space character.
And what it does is, it forces words to stay together
on the same line of text.
And so if you put a non-breaking space in between
the last two words of your paragraph,
those two words would always
appear together on the same line.
They're not allowed to be broken at the space.
Non-breaking spaces are also available in HTML,
if you're a web designer, and you access them
by using this character entity.
This law applies not only to body text,
but you also want to use this same law
if you're dealing with document titles,
subheadings, invitation text, et cetera.
You want to avoid having fewer than
seven characters per line in all your documents.
Here's an example where we've got a title,
and you can see that there's some dangling text here.
And then here's the same title, without the dangler.
We fixed this by making the size of the title
just a little bit smaller, and it was small enough
to force that last line to jump up
to the previous line of text.
So it's no longer all by itself.
And you can see just by looking at this
how much better it looks.
Now the text is visually balanced, the large gap is gone,
and we're not wasting all of that white space.
So here's an example of a party invitation
where there's some unbalanced, dangling text.
And then here's a better, visually balanced version.
Our invitation looks better, it's cleaner,
and the dangling text is not getting in the way
and calling so much attention to itself.
Let's summarize.
Always fix your dangling words and phrases.
These short lines of text are disrupting the balance
in your documents and on your pages.
They're wasting space, and they're calling
too much attention to themselves.
These dangling words and these dangling phrases
are also disrupting the flow of text in your documents.
So fixing these dangling words is going to
make your documents look more professional.
They'll look more visually appealing.
And you're going to be maximizing
the use of space on your pages.
That's Law 11: Don't allow less
than seven characters on the line.