Hacker News Reader

Those who lived through the (text-mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features which was advertised for this program, i.e it could be set to either move that orphaned first line of a new paragraph to the next page or move a few extra lines or a whole paragraph to the next page to keep the widow company.

View on HN

Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.

I remember using WordPerfect in that era and never understanding what that feature was. It seemed implausible to me that it was actually protecting human widows and orphans, but I couldn't imagine what it had to do with text layout!

Kinda cool when you learn the answer to something you were wondering about decades ago.

Absolutely! Unfortunately for me, I probably wondered about this 35 years ago and learned the answer 15 years ago. Otherwise, I could be one of today's lucky 10,000 in the xkcd 1053 sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com