Re: [CSS3 Text] Thoughts on hanging-punctuation property

When I learned typography, back in the day, hanging punctuation (as  
described by Daniel) was part of the craft of creating fine  
typography, even here in the U.S.

I don't see it so much these days (since the dawn of desktop  
publishing) in the type of books or other publications I typically  
read, but I think that is more due to quick and expedient publishing  
than anything else. That, and the fact that Adobe InDesign was the  
first widely-deployed page design program that could do them easily  
and automatically, and it is only a few years old. But I've never  
heard of limiting the hanging punctuation to just the first or last  
line before.

On Oct 9, 2007, at 6:53 PM, fantasai wrote:

>
> Daniel Aleksandersen wrote:
>> fantasai wrote:
>>> I haven't seen an equivalent demand for hanging other punctuation  
>>> at the
>>> start or end of every line. This could be because I haven't run  
>>> across
>>> the right publications, or it could be because it's not as  
>>> common, and
>>> therefore not as important for us to add to CSS at this point in  
>>> time.
>> When you say ‘Western’ you apparently mean American and British.  
>> As I said, it is common in Norwegian newspapers and books TODAY.   
>> I know I have seen hanging parentheses, brackets, and hyphen and  
>> dashes. We use «guillemets» for quotation marks and those are  
>> almost always hanging. Norwegian typography is derived from early  
>> 1900 German and French typography.  You will probably find left  
>> hanging punctuation in those languages as well.
>
> Well, I'll readily admit that my Norwegian collection is weak: I only
> have a small book of poetry in Norwegian. But I do happen to have some
> books in French from various publishers. Seven different publishers to
> be exact, and one of the books was published in 1925. None of them  
> exhibit
> hanging-punctuation of the kind you describe (or of any kind,  
> actually).
>
> I've also looked at some of the scans of Norwegian newspapers  
> available
> on the Web, and none of those demonstrate the use of hanging- 
> punctuation
> either...
>
> So if you have access to a scanner or a digital camera, it would  
> help if
> you could post some of your examples. You can send them to www- 
> archive@w3.org:
> the attachments will show up in the archives at
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/
>
> ~fantasai
>

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2007 04:43:11 UTC