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Question

Hanging punctuation InDesign

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
June 5, 2019
3 replies
35178 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.

BobLevine

Community Expert

It is absolutely for hanging punctuation.

Abambo

Community Expert

I'm with rob day!

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

Peter Villevoye

Community Expert

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.

Kudos for the very clear and elaborate explanation of what Optical Margin Alignment does. I'm sure it will help users understand very well now what it's actually about. I already knew and understand the concept of OMA, and how it tries to create optically less ragged and visually more pleasing margins.

But what I don't understand is its approach from a UX standpoint. No typographic designer thinks in "Stories". It would have been so much better if this option would be available as a setting under the Paragraph Style ! In stead of the need to switch it on by Story and the setting to switch it off on Paragraph level. The feature would probably have been much more common knowledge and obvious to use. And It would also be possible to use different values for different paragraph sizes.

And we still need negative outdents...

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