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

2011/4/8 John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>:
> 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?

Personally, the issue that I have with InDesign’s lack of “proper
hanging punctuation” is that Illustrator has it, in other words I
can’t reproduce what I can do in Illustrator in InDesign. The
discrepancy between the two programs in the same suite is what makes
it a problem. Of course, this is totally irrelevant in a discussion
about CSS, and I agree that hanging punctuation is just a way to
achieve optical margin alignment.

> 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.

InDesign’s optical alignment (or perhaps any optical alignment) fails
for Chinese too. We just don’t expect the left and right edges to be
optically aligned in the same way as they are aligned for Latin text.
-- 
cheers,
-ambrose

my thoughts on HTML5: http://goo.gl/vhv5F + http://goo.gl/leonq
(thanks and no thanks)

Received on Friday, 8 April 2011 17:57:08 UTC