An oblique stroke of genius…

The “slash” that we all have on our keyboards, is known as the virgule. The name comes down to us from Latin through French. It served medieval European literature as a comma and still performs this function in English language poetry. We also use it as a separation of like things (2005/2006), and it stands in for or (as in and/or).

The solidus is ever-so-slightly more oblique. It is the typographer’s fraction bar. Solidus was the name of a Roman coin. A Roman pound (libra) was comprised of 72 solidi. The British pound mark, £, is an ancestor of the Roman libra. The English shilling descends from the Roman solidus. The mark which separates British pounds, shillings and pence also came to be called the solidus (£ ⁄ s ⁄ d), and it is also a typographic character which is used to improvise fractions.

Don’t forget the widows and the orphans…

Pity the poor widow on the upper right page. Either give her a companion line, or move her back in with her family on the previous page. Ignore the orphan on the lower right. His future is assured on the next page.

Widows, as illustrated above are single, isolated lines of copy (or worse—single words) which end up alone, at the top of a page.

Orphans are created when the first line of a new paragraph is the last line of a page. Orphans are not necessarily problematic.

To remember which is which, Robert Bringhurst tells us that the widow has a past but no future, and the orphan has no past, but does have a future.