Thanks for the interesting replies to my question. It sounds as though TeX cannot do anything about widows and orphans in the boring "simple" case of a long pr

Thanks for the interesting replies to my question. It sounds as though TeX cannot do anything about widows and orphans in the boring "simple" case of a long prose text with a fixed number of lines per page, because the only way[] to improve page breaks in that case would be to change the line breaks, which have already been decided. Mixing up the line-break and page-break stages presumably gives you an NP-hard optimisation problem, and perhaps Knuth was less interested in working on messy heuristic algorithms. I've just found a couple of references to work in this area: https://mirrors.mit.edu/CTAN/macros/luatex/generic/lua-widow-control/lua-widow-control.pdf https://mirrors.mit.edu/CTAN/macros/luatex/generic/lua-widow... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/coin.12165 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/coin.12165 -------- [] I'm assuming that moving the margins or changing the line spacing would be unacceptable because it would make the pages of a book look obviously different from each other. So it turns out that the "simple" case is in some ways harder to handle than the "complex" case in which there are figures and footnotes and so on.