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KipTHuur
Participating Frequently
June 5, 2019
Question

Hanging punctuation InDesign

  • June 5, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 34972 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
rob day
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
    BobLevine
    Community Expert
    June 5, 2019

    It is absolutely for hanging punctuation.

    Abambo
    Abambo
    Community Expert
    June 5, 2019

    I'm with rob day!

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

    Have you tried to set the Optical Alignment?

    Abambo
    Abambo
    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

      Abambo
      Abambo
      Community Expert
      June 6, 2019

      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.


      I'm also thinking that the feature is quite obscure and your explanations helped a lot to understand how it works.

      My point in this is that it works for me even that I didn't grab the full story behind. But it gives hell a lot nicer results with no or little effort. And that was all I was using it for until now.

      What is missing in Indesign to fullfill OP's request are "hanging Quotes". I do not typeset books so that's not my interest at all. I could as well do hanging quotes with paragraph styles and inside of the frame...

      ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
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