Re: [css3-text] Hanging punctuation for Roman (was script-specific functionality

Alan Stearns wrote:

> InDesign only supports optical margin alignment, which happens to set quote
> marks outside the right edge of the text and thus approximates hanging
> punctuation. There has never been enough budget to do proper hanging
> punctuation...

Isn't hanging punctuation just a subset of optical margin alignment, 
though? The reason why punctuation was hung was to approximate optically 
aligned marging, by replacing the more noticeable intrusion of white 
space around punctuation into the text block with less noticeable 
intrusion of punctuation into the margin. The idea that 'proper' hanging 
punctuation is something desirable instead of or in addition to optical 
margin alignment seems strange to me, especially since the interaction 
of punctuation hanging with kerning to adjacent letters creates issues 
for the former. For instance, if the character pair A” ends a line of 
text, how do you hang the punctuation? Do you retain the proper kerning 
relationship of the punctuation to the letter, hence dragging part of 
the letter into the margin too? or do you only partially extend the 
punctuation into the margin, keeping the kerned distance to the letter? 
or do you break the kerning to hang the punctuation and create a huge 
white gap between the letter and the punctuation?

The issue that I have with InDesign's optical margin alignment is that 
while it works pretty well for Latin and similar scripts, it fails 
dramatically for many other writing systems whose glyphs involve greater 
use of horizontal extenders or open counter space. So what I'd like to 
see InDesign support, as a priority, is not hanging punctuation but the 
OpenType Layout optical margins features, which enable a font developer 
to set left and right sidebearing adjustments for margin alignment.

JH

Received on Friday, 8 April 2011 17:41:41 UTC