Page Layout ⇒ Single lines in document

[k123123]

Hi,
I'm writing a thesis which has mostly text and figures. Figures are inserted as [htbp] or [hbp] if I want to push it to the bottom. Often I will get a page with a single line of text, then a figure (might be half a page -- ie small enough for Latex to want to place the float 'inline'), then the next \section{} heading immediately below the figure.

Question -- how do I stop a single line appearing like this? Partly it is ugly; partly it is distracting; and partly, it is easy to miss this line because you immediately start looking at the figure at the (almost) top of the page. I searched a bit but I can only find info on 'widow/orphan' penalties; but this is not exactly the problem I have, since the text isn't on an otherwise empty page.

Is there a penalty I can set that forces Latex NOT to make a pagebreak on the previous page, and just include that extra line there.

Thanks

[Johannes_B]

Hi, there are penalties concerning such things (Controlling widows and orphans), but i guess something is wrong in your workflow. Could you try do prepare a minimal working example? This is extremely helpful to reproduce and understand the error.
The package mwe can help you with this.

How do you start a new paragraph? Are you using a blank line (that would be correct) or a double backslash \\ (that would be wrong)?

Best regards
Johannes

[k123123]

Sorry I don't understand what you mean by "workflow"...?

Thank you for the link -- I will look into that in more detail. So the widow/orphan penalty is not just for new (blank) pages, it applies when *any* paragraph is split to the next page? I didn't realise that.

I am starting a new paragraph with an empty line, not with \\, is that ok?
(I am also using the package 'parskip' so that new paragraphs are not indented)

I'll look into making a MWE, but everytime I make a small change it appears the layour changes, so sometimes this appears and sometimes not... I'll repost something when I see it next

Thanks for the quick reply

[Johannes_B]

If you are not able to reproduce this behaviour in form of an MWE (that is quite hard in this case), maybe a screenshot can help, with the code that produces it from your original code. This would not be an MWE, since we cannot reproduce it by compiling.