Is there a Regex way to find paragraph widows?

[Alan]

I have been updating the formatting of RTF books in preparation to go on a week vacation and loading the ePubs generated on my Kobo Clara 2E reader. Most of the time spent is on reducing the number of paragraph widows (by a visual scan of the whole story/book) as I prefer this aesthetically. Is there a way to write a Regex expression that will find paragraph widows (where the last line of the paragraph has only 1 word on it)?

Alan

[admin]

You cannot search for automatic line breaks because they are not present within document text. They are automatically produced by the pagination routine.

You should not expect that your eBook would be paginated by your eReader in the same way it is paginated in Atlantis.

[Alan]

Hi admin,
I do not concern myself with how the ePubs are paginated. My question only concerned the RTF document. Your answer tells me that the RTF paragraphs are seen as continuous strings of text with only the beginning and end known. Thanks.

Alan

[admin]

You can then search for the last space character before each hard break, and replace it with a nonbreaking space:

Find what:

Code: Select all

(^32)([!^w^p^l^n^m^45^~]{0,}[^p^l^n^m])

Replace with:

Code: Select all

^s\2

And to deal with hyphenated “widows” (replace ordinary hyphens with nonbreaking ones):

Find what:

Code: Select all

(^45)([!^w^p^l^n^m]{0,}[^p^l^n^m])

Replace with:

Code: Select all

^~\2

[Alan]

Thank you admin for the suggestions.

Alan