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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

BobLevine

Community Expert

I think the term hanging punctuation originates with metal typesetting, where a careful typesetter would adjust characters with extra negative space to avoid visual "holes" on the margins. Those were typically punctuation marks (but not all punctuation marks), so the easy descriptor was "hanging punctuation" and not "hanging glyphs with a lot of surrounding white space".

So it is easy to lose site of the original point and take the term literally. I don't think the careful metal typesetter would have hung a double angle quote, which would make the margin ragged in the opposite direction because the double angle quote doesn't have extra surrounding white space.

In the digital realm it's possible to give up the limited punctuation concept, and simply make the adjustment to all glyphs base on the space they occupy, and I think Adobe took advantage of that possibility from the beginning with OMA.

I remember the first time I used it back in 2001 with ID 1.5.

I loved the look of the type but my boss looked at me like I had two heads and made me “fix” it.

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