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KipTHuur
Participating Frequently
June 5, 2019
Question

Hanging punctuation InDesign

  • June 5, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 35203 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

3 replies

rob day
Community Expert
rob dayCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 5, 2019

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.

    BobLevine
    Community Expert
    BobLevineCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 5, 2019

    It is absolutely for hanging punctuation.

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 5, 2019

    I'm with rob day!

    ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
    Grant H
    Community Expert
    Grant HCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 5, 2019

    Have you tried to set the Optical Alignment?

    Abambo
    Community Expert
    AbamboCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 5, 2019

    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
      June 5, 2019

      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

      rob day
      Community Expert
      rob dayCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      June 5, 2019

      Hanging punctuation, optical alignment for characters and drop caps, negative outdents for lists, they all fall in the category "troublesome" in InDesign. QuarkXPress offers indeed better features and options, but I wouldn't trade in all the other InDesign goodies which Quark doesn't have...

      And I've never understood the rationale behind InDesign's approach for optical alignment. Some mysterious panel, with an even more mysterious setting, being applied to the range of a whole story ? This feature must have been thought out by the UX team at Devil's Design Day...


      And I've never understood the rationale behind InDesign's approach for optical alignment. Some mysterious panel, with an even more mysterious setting, being applied to the range of a whole story ? This feature must have been thought out by the UX team at Devil's Design Day...

      You can turn it on and off via the Paragraph Styles. See Ignore Optical margin in Indents and Spacing

      Optical spacing—accounting for the extra white space around certain characters—is important in typesetting. Think kerning pairs. Bob’s right if you Google InDesign Hanging Punctuation, you’ll get articles on how to use Optical Margin Alignment—I read it on the Internet.

      But just because users conflate optical alignment with literally hanging only and all punctuation marks, doesn't mean that you'll get that using OMA. If you think that's a good idea then it would be a feature request, not a bug report.

      The reason a double angle quote, or the number 2 for that matter, isn't adjusted is because they have little surrounding white space. When there's more relative white space with any glyph, there‘s more adjustment.

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