- From: John Hudson <john@tiro.ca>
- Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 12:20:44 -0800
- To: David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>
Dear David, Some general comments on hanging punctuation: The practice of hanging punctuation is so neglected, that a lot of people — including experienced digital typographers — do not favour it, or wish it to be implemented in a discreet way that involves a kind of compromise: punctuation extending a little into the margins, but not fully hanging. That kind of 'optical' alignment of margins is best accomplished, though, if it also takes into account letter shape (Adobe's optical margins algorithm attempts this, fairly well for European scripts and disastrously for many others). I consider this something different from hanging punctuation in the traditional sense, which is a practice in metal typography based, in turn, on manuscript models. Hanging punctuation is based on the observation that a small black intrusion into the expanse of white margin is less disruptive of the appearance of a block of text than the corresponding intrusion of white space into the text would be. This is important to understand and to see. I learned from letterpress printers to check margins by holding the page at a shallow angle, looking up the line of the margin. I recommend this, as it makes evident just how much more impact white space intruding into the text has than punctuation intruding into the margin. That said, some responses to your questions, and an attempt to define a reasonable standard behaviour: > (1) Can you only hang one character? That’s what I did, but if there’s a run of characters all in the Ps category should I be hanging them all when hanging-punctuation is “first” or just a single one? (Similar question for “last”.) In my research of typography examples, I do see situations where - for example - a period and quote mark together both get hung. Correct. Another case would be stacked quotes '", and that of course implies e.g. ,'" This is where things start extending too far into the margin: one or two narrow punctuation marks in the margin are fine, but wider punctuation (dashes, ellipsis) and multiple punctuation marks draw too much attention to themselves and stick out too far. My take on this is that there should be a maximum distance beyond which punctuation should not extend. > (3) allow-end/force-end doesn’t include hyphens. In my research of hanging punctuation, I found typographic examples of hanging punctuation where hyphens hang at the end of lines of justified text. I wonder if this should be an additional value to the property. It’s unclear to me if people want this capability or not, but I figured I’d mention it since I found examples of it. Hyphens should definitely hang if punctuation is hanging. Hyphens are among the most obvious candidates for hanging because they carry so much white space above and below them. [By the same token, it should be obvious that punctuation such as ! and ? do not hang.] > (4) How to handle kerning, e.g., for hanging-punctuation:first, if I hang an opening quote mark, the next letter may also be offset to the left, since it pushes into the quotation mark. Should kerning simply be turned off when you hang punctuation between the hung punctuation and the following glyph? The easiest way to think about this is in terms of the purpose of hanging punctuation, i.e. to create a tidy block of text in which the margins are characterised by the shapes of letters, rather than the intrusion of white space around punctuation. Therefore, it follows that hanging punctuation should take into account kerning to letters. So, for example, if a line begins with a double quotation mark and an uppercase A, I would expect kerning to be applied between two two, and that the punctuation only extend so far into the margin as would align the A with the same letter starting a line by itself above or below. In other words, the hang of the quotation mark would be it's normal hang distance minus it's kern to the A. So: 1. Hang individual, narrow punctuation — including hyphen — full in the margin. 2. Establish a maximum hang distance to allow multiple punctuation and wider punctuation to extend into the margin (probably slightly wider than the hyphen). 3. Adjust hang distance based on kerning to adjacent non-hanging letters and other characters. JH -- John Hudson Tiro Typeworks Ltd www.tiro.com Salish Sea, BC tiro@tiro.com Getting Spiekermann to not like Helvetica is like training a cat to stay out of water. But I'm impressed that people know who to ask when they want to ask someone to not like Helvetica. That's progress. -- David Berlow
Received on Saturday, 5 March 2016 20:21:16 UTC