Strange orphan behavior in tables

[Andy Kass]

Hi again,

Fred Ridder wrote:
>
>> Andy Kass wrote (in small part): 
>> 
>> I actually don't mind breaking a small table, since I have
>> fairly tall rows. And if it does break like that, having
>> orphans is better than having widows. However, not being
>> able to use the space created at the bottom of the page
>> makes it all useless. Maybe my tables are haunted by the
>> ghost of the widow's spouse. 
>
> Are you saying that you'd like to be able to put text at
> the bottom of the page in between the parts of a table
> that breaks across pages? Or are you saying that you
> wouldn't mind pushing the whole table to the next page
> if you could fill the empty space that is created at the
> bottom of the first page? [...]

Not quite. Say I have a table with 3 rows, each one inch
high, and the orphan row setting is 2. Lets pretend this
table fits on a page, but then I add content above the
table that pushes it down.

As soon as the bottom row of the table doesn't fit, the
last 2 rows of the table jump to the next page. This is
the first quirk, that an orphan setting of 2 allows a
single orphan row orphan (feature or bug, you decide).

I should now be able to insert more content *above* my
table, pushing the orphan row down to my page margin.
However, as soon as the orphan row gets pushed to within
an inch of the page margin, the whole table jumps to the
next page. If row 2 of my table is 2 inches high, the
table jumps when the orphan row is within 2 inches of
the page margin. The only explanation I could find was
that this is a bug (or a ghost row).

Note that this does not happen if you have 2 or more times
as many rows as your orphan row setting. In that case, the
setting works exactly as documented, and you don't have the
problem with unusable whitespace mentioned above.

Thanks,

  Andy