In Le ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter talks about how writing the book using 90s-era desktop publishing software allowed him to spot widows, orphans and o

In Le ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter talks about how writing the book using 90s-era desktop publishing software allowed him to spot widows, orphans and other typographic ugliness as he was composing the text, and he would fix these by rewriting the text rather than adjusting the typography, which resulted in many improvements. I prefer writing in WYSIWYG editors for this reason – it’s good to have an external trigger that prompts you to try rephrasing, even if it’s effectively random.