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Question

Hanging punctuation InDesign

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
June 5, 2019
3 replies
35276 views

Hanging puctuation in InDesighn does not work very well. Sorry to say, Quark XPress is far superior. Maybe I do something wrong – I do it by the book/manual – and it does not look good. Any tips from professionals?

Egil Haraldsen

indesign typography

rob day

Community Expert

I don’t think the InDesign Optical Margin Alignment feature is the same as hanging punctuation. I take to mean there is an attempt to adjust the text block to have better optical alignment, so larger glyphs that take up more space—like a question mark or your double angle quote—move less than a period or hyphen.

K

KipTHuurAuthor

Participating Frequently

If that is so, how do we get hanging punctuation then?

Abambo

Community Expert

The Quark style is IMHO the more logical approach here. Use Bob's link to enter a feature request.

If the reason for "hanging punctuation" is to prevent the extra white space around a hyphen or period that might create a ragged appearance on the justified text block’s margin, the same would happen if you hung a glyph with little surrounding white space. Why would you want to hang a question mark, but not the number 2? They both take up similar optical space.

InDesign's feature is different, but more sophisticated. If for some reason you want to hang all punctuation glyphs no matter how much optical space they occupy, then that‘s not an option.

Here you can see the "hang amount" is relative to the glyph’s white space:

I use the Optical Margin Alignment feature and I love it. It works well but it is somewhere "hidden away". I never felt comfortable having that feature attached to the frame, but if it is attached to the frame, it could also be an attribute of the frame.

I do not use it for "hanging quotations" which is what the OP does. It would be useful to have that feature too. When I need that feature, I need it only for special reasons. I adjust therefore manually. But if you're typesetting a book, that's pretty unpractical.

For now, I would do hanging quotations with a paragraph style.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

Grant H

Community Expert

Have you tried to set the Optical Alignment?

Abambo

Community Expert

Discussion successfully moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to InDesign

May be you could start to explain what does not work well. I'm sure the experts in the InDesign - forum can help.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

K

KipTHuurAuthor

Participating Frequently

You’re right. Here is what does not work: I want to have the whole quotation mark outside the body of text. In InDesign I only get half of it outside. I use these marks: « ». Egil

BobLevine

Community Expert

Did you adjust it?

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