I think that using a tab, you have to indent the entire rest of the text — tabs can’t hang out at the left side.

A manual trick is inserting a hair space first, so you can use kerning to move the character up to 1000 units out to the left.

The Optical Margin option has some weird issues, such as where it’s switched on (in a control panel of its own to work on entire text threads, where you’d expect it to be something paragraph related) and off (that’s in Paragraph settings), and the ’amount’ value, that can only be set for one size for aforementioned entire text thread.

So, plenty room of improvements. Anything more would be a bonus.

Hanging punctuation in InDesign has been an embarrassment from the get-go, along with the ’optical kerning’ feature that wrecks all reasonably well-spaced fonts, most pertinently Adobe’s own. (Yikes! The emdashes hanging out of the margin like smuts on an old-fashioned mechanical!) However, of all programs, Ventura Publisher has long done it right, with customizable hanging punctuation, and Quark 8 does it even better, with a deep range of customization options. We can expect to see Quark’s feature in the next InDesign, and perhaps, at last, we’ll see an end to optical justification. What is the matter with it?

Here’s an example I’ve often given before. Let’s look at what optical kerning does to one of Adobe’s own state-of-the-art fonts, Adobe Garamond OT Pro. Consider the simple word ’jumps’ at 12 points. This word sets perfectly and doesn’t require any kerning. It has been carefully optimized by Adobe’s well-known and absolutely competent font designer Robert Slimbach to have perfect spacing at this point size. No kerning or respacing is needed.

Now let’s specify Adobe’s ’optical’ kerning. InDesign subtracts 23 units of space between j and u, adds 14 units between u and m, subtracts 16 units between m and p, and -1 units between p and s. The result is bad. The u is now too close to j, and there is a noticeable river of space between u and m. A well-made font has been rendered useless.

What is it with marketing? Adobe tells you it’s bringing you fine typography at last. You believe it — what’s to doubt? A gazillion years later it begins to occur that this isn’t so.

What are we on? Indy 5? Oh come on!

The solution is very simple: Adobe should implement the support for the Optical Bounds OpenType Layout feature in InDesign. If present in the font, it should override the results of the built-in automatic optical bounds calculation. Therefore, to customize the result of the optical margin alignment, the user would just need to add an “opbd” feature to the font using any of the existing font editing applications.

This would be a solution very “cheap” for Adobe as they would not need to add any UI for the stuff in InDesign (something that most product manager find horrifying), and they would not need to invent anything new (just implement what is specified in the OpenType spec).

BTW, I agree that the current results of the optical margin alignment in InDesign are not so good, and for some glyphs (e.g. the – or the — ) they are just horrific.

Adam

I agree that (automatic) optical margin alignment does not give good results in all cases. Especially with dashes which Adam mentioned.

Saying goodbye to automatism, even gradually, is not a solution though:
1st, I remember the time before optical margin alignment, with all the ’bites’ with punctuation marks and certain letters. And also remember that earlier XPress simply placed punctuation marks outside of the text block, which was the same but the other way round ... InDesign’s optical margin alignment was an improvement to both.*
2nd, ’opbd’ is nice for type designers who want to do it all on their own, and in the extreme case would define correction values per each glyph. But still, this is just one set of correction values for all sizes, whereas automatic optical margin alignment has a size parameter. (So to extend what Adam suggests: if a font supports ’opbd’, use it, but if a user activates optical margin alignment, use that instead of ’opbd’.)

I would encourage improving the algorithm rather than going back to manual tweaking. The latter is fine with a single font, or two, or three. Whether in the font editor or in the design application. But if this tweaking can be expressed in an algorithm, it makes sense to turn it into something automatic. Not on the font editor side but on the rasterizer or application side.

* There is a funny effect: As long as technology determines esthetic standards, nobody complains nor even sees that something is wrong. Like, most people were fine with the ragged margins that result from relying on glyphs’ side bearings. But as soon as optical margin alignment arrived, people started talking about dashes and certain letters standing out more than they expected etc ... These are minor issues compared to what we had before.

Like, most people were fine with the ragged margins that result from relying on glyphs’ side bearings.

Good point, and speaking of points, I’ve always been bothered when trying to square off a paragraph (without automatic “Optical” alignment)—the period is never far enough to the right, because of its right sidebearing.

An optical alignment setting that removed all marginal sidebearings would be good for bold faces.

**

I agree with Bill about the counterproductive effect of Optical kerning on serif faces. However, it’s not too bad on sans serif types and in mixed-font situations. If someone is picky enough and savvy enough to apply this feature, wouldn’t they also be aware that it isn’t foolproof, and use it with discretion? There are exceptions of course, for instance those who apply it indiscriminately as their own personal default.

Just a small, practical note for the existing program . . .

A manual trick is inserting a hair space first, so you can use kerning to move the character up to 1000 units out to the left.

If you make up a zero width space (U+200B), you can also kern against it. Since it has zero width, you can change the out-dent by (1) changing the size of the character, (2) the kern value (limited to 999 units), or both. I had an oops the first time I did this, kerned something right off the paper using a 100-point space with a (minus) 999-unit kern. If you think on it, a 12 point zero-width space with a 1,000 unit kern is a pica. A 24-point space with the same kern would be 2 picas, etc.

On a larger scale, the problem is always what to hang. Back in the 1990s when we were using TeX, we had a customer who played with hanging punctuation. You could, technically, program whatever you wanted. But you’d run into problems — with close single quote followed by close double quote, what do you hang? All of it? Just the double quote? How about a em-dash? en-dash? How about a dash followed by a close quote? And even ignoring sidebearings, you’re never going to get all the optical whitespace out of the different letters, so they form an optical rule — the old question of how much ink does it take before it is too significant to hang?

Optical margin alignment is an entirely different thing than optical kerning.

For folks who would like to see hanging punctuation handled differently in InDesign, please do let the InDesign team know directly:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Cheers,

T

Optical margin alignment is an entirely different thing than optical kerning.

Thomas is right. The vocabulary is unfamiliar and it is perilously easy to make a mistake, as I did when I wrote ’optical justification’ for ’optical kerning’.

It is painful to have to criticize InDesign’s optical kerning because it represents years of work by Peter Karow, founder of URW, without whom we would not have digital type. Yet it needs to be done, as optical kerning only works for some very badly spaced fonts and in some mixed type-size-style situations. It’s partly a marketing problem: too much was claimed for it; there was not enough information; expectations were too high. It was years before we discovered that InDesign’s optical kerning respects only O-O as the one possible valid space/kern in a font it is adjusting (or something like that — John Hudson worked it out after he had been alerted to the problems it caused in the Microsoft ClearType booklet he designed). I can’t find a system based on this convincing, but if users had been warned this system was only likely to be valuable in certain limited situations, most possible criticism would have been deflected.

That said, optical kerning represents only a fraction of the ambitious HZ composition system that was long ago conceptualized by Dr Karow and others. To be implemented properly it requires multiple master fonts with at least a width axis. We must hope that Adobe is still giving it some back-burner development time, despite the expectation that it would be a decade or two before it could be implemented.

And that said, I really do think Adobe was right — over the piteous wailings of righteously outraged type purists — to implement, as an interim stopgap, the feature of horizontal scaling as a tightly controllable element of H&J in InDesign CS3. Used judiciously, a percent here and there of horizontal scaling should not be objectionable. It’s a long way away from HZ, but it’s a decisive step in the right direction.

And all of that said, I wonder if some of the systems discussed on Typophile for auto-spacing/auto-kerning a few years back by Raph Levien and others could possibly represent an advance on Dr Karow’s earlier algorithms?

And all of that said, some criticism of optical alignment could have been deflected had the philosophy of the settings been ’only do it enough so that a user won’t notice it’ instead of ’do it enough so the user will really notice it’.