I have some copy that I am setting as ragged-right, but I am trying to set it in the cleanest possible way without egregious rags while also avoiding creating orphans. With the current text, it seems I am stuck in between a rock and a hard place. When I try to avoid the large dip in the text length, I get an orphan at the end, but when I try to get rid of the orphan I get a rag. I am currently following the following guide:
http://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/text-typography/rags-widows-orphans
as I am an neophyte. The Author suggests that you solve for rags by manually creating the line breaks, which is what I have been doing. I don't know if this small problem merits messing with column width or font-size, which both seem last resort options. Is there some process or algorithm which designers use to make the cleanest ragged right text that I am unaware of, which could get me out of my current situation?
Or maybe one of the above is professionally acceptable, but I wouldn't know as I don't know the guidelines.