How to prevent widows and orphans in a table

Hello, I’m wondering if it’s possible to prevent orphans and widows in a table while using outline folding. Should I try a workaround without tables or is the outline folding the issue ?

I’d like to prevent widows and orphans when I activate and deactivate outline folding but it doesn’t seem to work at all. :confused:

Here’s an exemple of the type of document I want to prevent orphans and widows in: (sorry it’s in French :wink: )
Modele_Fiche_en_cours.odt (979.0 KB)

Inside tables, most Text Flow settings don’t work. And this seems logical (though I disagree for some of them): a table is nested inside a page. Layout for a cell must not conflict with the surrounding page. Thus the “easy” protection is to disable text flow settings.

So I should rework the document to not use tables if I want to prevent orphans and widows ?

Have a try. Look carefully at your layout. Widow/Orphan control is only necessary on multi-line paragraphs and I don’t see many of them (perhaps none). So, is it really widow/orphan control you have in mind? Isn’t it rather an “atomic cell” you need? In this case, disabled Allow table/row to split across pages and columns in table properties. Be selective: this is probably needed only on rows.

I intended to use widow/orphan control while grouping paragraphs with the one after. I think I’ll look a bit more into “atomic cell” to see if it does what I want, thanks for the answers. :slight_smile:

You have a misconception about widow/orphan. It deals with page break occurring inside a paragraph. You can define the minimum count of lines at bottom of the page or at top of next. If this minimum is not achieved, the page break is moved either before or after the paragraph.

The relation between several paragraphs is controlled by Keep with next paragraph. You have to enable it in each paragraph style. This is used in Heading n so that the heading is not orphaned at bottom of page. But, beware, the effect is cumulative. If you have many one-line paragraphs, you’ll end up with a huge “atomic” block. So, think carefully about your sequence.