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

On 4/8/11 10:41 AM, "John Hudson" <tiro@tiro.com> wrote:

> 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 A² 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

I think that optical margin alignment and hanging punctuation serve similar
purposes, but hanging punctuation is not a strict subset. There have been
times that I wanted *only* punctuation to hang, and the optical margin
alignment in InDesign is too blunt a tool for that (I get a bit unnerved to
see the crossbar of a capital T spill into the margin). The feature needs
more than just an on/off checkbox.

Perhaps the model to follow should be access to the font feature plus the
ability to manually adjust, like what we have with kerning.

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Friday, 8 April 2011 17:55:49 UTC