Reply To: Problem with Optical Margin Alignment in a list

Obi-wan, here’s how I understand the situation. The poems each have a list label to the left of first line and the text of the poem is set off from the label by some white space, which prevents the quotation mark at the beginning of the text of the poem from moving to the left of the indent. Masood is suggesting, I think, that the labels be put in one frame and the text of the poems in another so OMA can affect the quotation mark at beginning of the first line of the text. It is not clear how the labels are then to be coordinated with the poems. One could no doubt achieve this using anchored frames for the labels though I’m not sure how one would automate the numbering.

This is a problem I run into all the time with lists but have decided to ignore the inconsistency. In this case, I’d probably change the design to put the label against the right edge of the text frame, as one would when numbering equations, or put it on a line above the text of the poem, which used to be a common style for untitled poems. On the other hand, if the quotation mark is the only character that occurs at the beginning of a first line and needs to be adjusted by OMA, Jim could set up a variant of the list style that simulates OMA with a tab stop moved slightly to the left. He would have to set up another style for instances where the first line did not begin with a quotation mark.