Hanging Punctuation with Optical Margin Alignment in InDesign

Sometimes little things can make a big difference. When it comes to typography this is especially true. One of the simplest enhancements you can make to your type—especially if you’re working with justified type—is to use Optical Margin Alignment.

What is Optical Margin Alignment?

Have you ever noticed how punctuation at the margin of a text frame can make the left or right sides of a column appear misaligned? When a line begins with punctuation, like an opening quotation mark, or ends with a comma, period, or hyphen, you get a visual hole. Once, this was regarded as the price of progress. We could do so much more with our page layout programs-did it matter that we had to forgo a few niceties? But today, with InDesign’s Optical Margin Alignment, we can easily ensure that punctuation, as well as the edges of letters, hangs outside the text frame or column margins so that the column edge remains flush (Figure 1).

This makes Optical Margin Alignment especially beneficial when working with justified text, but even with left-aligned text, the first character of the line will “hang” outside the text frame.

Optical margin alignment isn’t to everyone’s taste. Some consider the look of optically aligned text too fussy, preferring instead to have everything contained within the text frame. Perhaps they became accustomed to text columns that weren’t optically aligned during the early days of desktop publishing because it wasn’t possible, in the same way as some people have become so accustomed to the taste of instant coffee that they prefer it to the real thing.

How to Use It

Optical margin alignment is controlled through the Story panel,

which is perhaps the simplest panel in InDesign (Figure 2). You select the story you want to align, either with the Selection tool or the Type tool, choose Story from the Type menu, check the box and you’re good to go. The only user-defined option is the font size, which determines the amount of overhang.

Theoretically, the amount of “hang” should be set to the same size as the text, but in practice you’ll probably just want to eyeball it. Optical Margin Alignment is technically a story-wide attribute (not paragraph-or frame-based). That’s why it shows up in the Story panel, and you won’t find it in your Paragraph Style Options. If you want to apply it globally (and consistently), you’ll need to incorporate it into an Object Style definition, which you can then apply to your text frames (Figure 3). While you’re defining an Object Style for your text frame, you may also want to incorporate additional specs, such as the number of columns in your text frame, a text wrap, or the Paragraph style that is applied to the content of the frame. If your text is very structured, you can even specify the Next style option, so that you apply a sequence of styles to your text. But I’m getting a bit off topic; that’s another story…

When to Avoid Optical Margin Alignment

There are certain types of paragraph that won’t benefit from optical margin alignment. The left edges of bullets and numbered lists, for example, should remain flush. To do this, choose the Ignore Optical Margin Alignment option in your Paragraph Style Options (Figure 4). Or, if you want to turn it off manually—as a local override to a particular paragraph-you can select Ignore Optical Margin from the Control or Paragraph panel menu.

Hanging Punctuation

A couple other InDesign features are closely related to Optical Margin Alignment. The first is the Indent to Here character, which can be used to good effect on display text— especially pull quotes and callouts that begin with a quote mark—to create a hanging indent and thus maintain the flushed edge of the text (Figure 5). You can hang an opening quote mark using the Indent to Here character: Cmd+\ (CtrI+\). This special character indents all subsequent lines in the paragraph to the point where you add the character, fixing the optical hole on the left edge of the text.

The second related feature is the Align Left Edge checkbox that’s part of the Drop Cap and Nested Style options. This ensures that your opening character is flush with the left edge of the text frame, again avoiding the problem of a visual hole (Figure 6). Anyone who remembers the workaround of adding a space before such characters and then kerning back over the space to achieve an optically aligned look will appreciate the convenience of this feature. They’re small things, but Optical Margin Alignment, hanging punctuation, and its related features are quick and easy ways to add panache to your type. Doing so shows attention to detail and gives your text a sophisticated look and, consequently, more credibility with its readers.