Orphans
by Marcin Pietrzak on WordPress.org
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The Orphans plugin automatically improves the typography of your WordPress site by preventing single-letter or very short words—known as orphans—from appearing alone at the beginning of a line. By replacing the space after these words with a non-breaking space, the plugin ensures cleaner, more professional-looking text layouts, especially for languages like Polish where such typographic rules are important.
What are Orphans?
An orphan in typography is a short word (often a single character) left isolated at the beginning of a line, separated from the rest of the sentence. This is considered a composition error and can negatively affect readability and the visual appeal of your content.
Key Features
- Automatic Orphan Fixing: Scans your content and replaces spaces after short words (orphans) with non-breaking spaces, preventing them from being separated by line breaks.
- Customizable: Easily modify which words are treated as orphans using filters, or provide your own list of orphan terms.
- Non-Destructive: The plugin does not alter your original content in the database; changes are applied only when content is displayed.
- Builder and Plugin Integration: Seamless compatibility with popular page builders like Bricks, Divi, Muffin (beTheme), WPBakery, and Advanced Custom Fields.
- Flexible Usage: Apply orphan fixes to custom fields or any string using provided filters.
How It Works
Once activated, Orphans automatically processes your posts, pages, and other content post types, fixing orphaned words on the fly. You can customize its behavior through the settings panel found under Appearance > Orphans, or extend functionality with WordPress filters for advanced use cases.
Ideal For
- Bloggers, publishers, and editors seeking to maintain high typographic standards.
- Sites in languages (like Polish or Czech) where orphan control is a common publishing requirement.
- Anyone wanting to enhance the professional appearance and readability of their WordPress content.
Open Source & Developer Friendly
Orphans is open source, actively maintained, and available on GitHub for those interested in contributing or extending its features.
