Check :

'Some cool old manuscripts'
http://www.typophile.com/cgibin/show.pl?30/57062

'Hang It Here'
http://desktoppub.about.com/library/weekly/aa062002a.htm

'Hanging Punctuation & CSS'
http://realworldstyle.com/hang_punct.html

Regards,
AS

Hey thanks!

Gil

I doubt if you will find "a rule" in regard to hanging punctuation prior to the digital era. It was more often used as an optical adjustment and not often applied consistently, in either manuscript work or in the work of the early printers.

And, unfortunately, even though page-layout programs like InDesign provide for it, it really does need to be adjusted per differing punctuation instance and on a per face basis, which they do not provide for. You can obviously adjust it manually, but we live in a world of "button pushing," and manual adjustments, bit of an absurdity, huh?

>"button pushing," and manual adjustments, bit of an absurdity, huh?

However, "Command - backslash" is brilliant for pull-quotes!

Gerald, could you explain on what principles you think the hanging punctuation should be adjusted with different punction and different faces? You can globally adjust the spacing of hanging punctuation in InDesign using the 'font size' specification.

1. The only known rule for how to use hanging punctuation is good taste.

2. My personal rule is, if you can notice it, you've gone too far. That rules out the default settings for InDesign, which push emdashes so far out into the margin that they look a piece of hair you accidentally shed onto your old-fashioned mechanical. Right gives me the creeps!

It's easy to see why Adobe did this: if you can't see it, you don't know you have a feature, and if you don't have a feature, why would you buy the program to start with? So it's way overdone. The feature needs to be rethought. In the meantime, the only way to get good results is still by careful attention to each line of text - for those with the time to do a job right. If you don't have the time to do this, you shouldn't be worrying about hanging punctuation. It can't be done well automatically, at least not with the software we presently have available.

William

I think Bill has given pretty much the same response as I would have. Mechanical-based global adjustments won't get you to where you want to be. It's based on the eye (and, as Bill points out, typographic good taste). The goal is to find settings that are visually correct. Invariably each glyph that is to be hung is going to require a specific adjustment. And then are adjustments for optical illusion. This is not something that can be spelled out but it can certainly be learned.

But as Bill also pointed out, and as my old instructor used to admonish, "if you don't have the time to do it correctly, when will you?"

>it really does need to be adjusted per differing punctuation instance

Right.

Corel Ventura did/does exactly this: You can specify punctuation marks (exactly: each character) and the amount of hanging in percent. So you can specify different indent or outdent for - ! . ?

The OpenType specification includes layout features for optical margins, which allow one to specify beginning and end of line alignment for any glyph in a font: a GPOS adjustment of left or right sidebearing. The attractiveness of this model is, of course, that hanging puctuation -- and other refinements of optical margins such as compensations for letters like A T V W -- can be dealt with in a design-specific way. The only downside is that it cannot be size-specific* for scaled type (although, obviously, could be for specific size masters).

At present, this OTL feature is not supported in any apps, but would be a welcome addition. I suspect support is most like to appear from Microsoft's side.

You can add support for this feature to fonts using VOLT, but the UI isn't really conducive to it because there is no way to view vertical relationship in the GPOS window or in the proofing tool. I've discussed this with MS, but I'm guessing that a dedicated little margin alignment applet capable of generating a VOLT lookup file might be the simplest short-term approach.


*Device-dependent adjustments are available for low resolutions, so there is some size-dependent support. This would be desirable for controlling the amount of hang on screen, where rounding errors may result in more or less hang than one might want at specific sizes.

let me add: visually correct outdenting hyphen marks.
And: the way too much outdenting of mdashes is really a problem with InDesigns hanging punctuation feature. You always have to adjust manually.

A good hanging punctuation feature (as Venturas) should help getting visually more even or straight columns/edges of justified text.

This is done by taking into account the bigger whitespace around small signs of punctuation (that produces white gaps in the edge without hanging punctuation), but also its form (as with the mdash-problem: calculating only whitespace leads to way too much outdenting, so here you have to compromise).
In the end visually you should not notice in- or outdenting but an even gray edge without white gaps or black bulges.

For example with the german double quote

Now I've found out:
In Corel Ventura hanging punctuation can be set differently for each "chapter" in a publication.
I've attached a screenshot (unfortunately I have installed a german version only at the moment).
In the list you can list all marks or characters that should be outdented (left or right) and the amount in percent of the character width. You can specify as much values as you need (the bottom buttons insert and delete).



Such a setting would be fine for other applications too.

I am just amazed that Corel Ventura gets this feature totally right, and Adobe InDesign gets it totally wrong. But ... everyone is talking about Adobe's 'FEATURE' which you can see at once, and nobody is talking about Corel's 'feature' which does the job invisibly. Which approach is more valuable in fine typography?

back to the topic "rule":

I found "hanging punctuation" in the following books:
James Felici, The complete Manual of Typography, 2003, p. 191 (paragraph about "Hanging Characters")

"Hanging punctuation is ... used ... to give the right-hand edge of the text block a smoother appearance. Because punctuation characters ... are graphically weak, lines that end with them appear to be slightly indented ... By letting such characters hang out somewhat past the nominal margin of the column (... the edge of the text frame), the margin looks straighter, as the characters that precede the punctuation come closer to setting flush right. The idea is to find a happy medium in which the margin looks smoother but without the appearance of having whiskers, with all those hyphens hanging in space." (bold setting by me, ms)

A "happy medium" is a very fine term for what has to be achieved by the feature "hanging punctuation".

I remember to have read more times about that, but at the moment can't find. I think it was in german books too and have to translate.

One with a detailed dicussion of benefits and the too-much of outdenting is:

Friedrich Forssman / Ralf de Jong, Detailtypografie, Mainz 2002 (but there is an improved 2nd print), p. 116-119
Under the term "Randausgleich" (they mean more balanced justification) they discuss hanging punctuation or better well balanced justification in normal text size and display sizes.

Balanced justification also has to take account f j J in some fonts when they have wide horizontal strokes. (Forssman/de Jonge discuss that as well).

(In Ventura you could even do this, just insert "J" in the list for hanging punctuation and specify the amount of outdenting).

The different approach between InDesign and Ventura may result from different kind of work:
Ventura has been used for setting large amounts of text and books, where a sophisticated hanging-punctuation-feature is essential if you want to achieve a justification/column of high quality (or the "invisible job").
InDesigns first jobs weren't books, and for display setting the results of its feature maybe appropriate (as I sometimes like the "visible" manner of its feature for emphasizing citations in quotes).

But as InDesign (for me) is the very best application regarding typography - see it's far better justification, using open type features and so on, it would be great if its feature "Optischer Randausgleich" (the german name of the "hanging punctuation"-feature in InDesign - I don't know the english term) could get the functionality of Venturas hanging-punctuation/characters-tables.

This is a great summary which shows what Ventura could do if it had OT support. But you know, even without OT support, I think I might start using it? The only real advantage I can see in InDesign is multi-line justification, and since I am never going to set anything without spending a few moments to examine each line individually anyway, it really isn't a big deal for me.

One thing I think worth pointing out is that it is a little presumptuous to speak of 'rules' for hanging punctuation when there aren't any, and there has been so very little experience with it. When James Felici writes, using that terribly impressive passive voice, hanging punct IS, etc. he gives a very false impression. Hanging punct IS nothing at all. Hanging punct MAY BE or MIGHT BE or COULD BE.

In other words, we have to treat hanging punct as what it really is, something quite new in typography, with which nobody has much experience, and to which we must apply a lot of common sense. Adobe has not done this, and has configured it in a manner which is not just unhelpful, but actually harmful. If people once get the idea that there is something 'right' or 'correct' about the way InDesign does hanging punctuation, we are in real trouble. Fortunately, nobody really does seem to have that idea. What InDesign is doing with hanging punct actually does look wrong to people, hence this thread. I am very grateful to Michael for bringing Ventura back into the picture. I am just amazed that the Ventura team thought this feature through so carefully. Why aren't Quark and Adobe doing the same?

Edit: Michael, I believe it is optical character alignment (Optischer Randausgleich).

Thanks Gerald, thanks everyone. This has been more helpful than I thought it would turn out.

I'm straying off topic, but I've never really looked at Ventura. Ya know, the Macromedia/Adobe merger may give Corel some motivation to update some of its apps.

I wonder if it will give Adobe motivation to do something with FOG?

Gerald