Dealing with widows in a multicol environment

Question

I have problems with dealing with widows within a multicols environment, that is, I have not managed to instruct LaTeX to remove the them.

This PDF document shows an example of the problem. At the top of the second page, I get a widow from the last paragraph of the first page. I have tried a couple of approaches, without luck:

setting both \widowpenalty and \clubpenalty to high values
switching between \raggedcolumns and \flushcolumns
adjusting the collectmore and unbalance counters

I've also read through the documentation for multicol but have not found anything useful.

Is there anything else I could try?

(The complete LaTeX document for the above example)

this doesn't exactly solve your problem, but have you thought about trying to adjust the space between your columns? — Mica, Mar 05 '10 at 16:51
Mica: Have not tried that. Not sure it would look good though, as the document includes many two col multicols environments. — Guðmundur H, Mar 07 '10 at 11:07

Alexey Malistov · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-05T16:40:18.990

{\obeyspaces\gdef\nomorebreak{\beginnomorebreak\let \nobreakspace}}
\def\beginnomorebreak{\begingroup
   \def\par{\endgraf\endgroup\par\penalty 9999 }\obeyspaces
   \brokenpenalty 10000 \widowpenalty 10000 \clubpenalty 10000 }
\def\nobreakspace{\vadjust{\nobreak} \removespaces}
\def\removespaces{\futurelet\next\checkspace}
\def\checkspace{\ifx\next\nobreakspace\expandafter\removesinglespace\fi}
\def\removesinglespace#1{\removespaces}

Insert \nomorebreak at any place of your paragraph. Page breaks will be prohibited after this macro until the end of the paragraph.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 04 '19 at 08:29

It seems that the TeX FAQ item Controlling widows and orphans has some options you did not try yet.

Getting rid of a widow can be more tricky. Options are

If the previous page contains a long paragraph with a short last line, it may be possible to set it “tight”: write \looseness=-1 immediately after the last word of the paragraph.

If that doesn’t work, adjusting the page size, using \enlargethispage{\baselineskip} to “add a line” to the page, which may have the effect of getting the whole paragraph on one page.

Reducing the size of the page by \enlargethispage{-\baselineskip} may produce a (more-or-less) acceptable “two-line widow”.

Dealing with widows in a multicol environment

2 Answers2