Hanging Punctuation/Optical Margins for Glyphs?

[HeyKate27]

Is it possible to have optical margin alignment for glyphs?

I have a list of names, and there are two denotations, a heart symbol, and a basic 'dot' symbol. The 'dot' works with optical margin alignment, the heart does not. Is there any way to get this same effect so that the hearts hang outside of the bounding box? This is a very very large document with thousands of lines, so I'm looking for a solution that's possible to do this without editing each line one-by-one.

[HeyKate27]

One solution I can think of, is editing a font's dot symbol to be a heart instead, so that it would be considered punctuation, maybe that would make it hang off the side? Not sure how feasible that is, or if there already is an existing font with the heart tagged as punctuation.

[Barb Binder]

You hit on the key issue—optical margin alignment only works with punctuation. I don't know how to designate the heart as punctuation—I would handle by decreasing the margin and using indents and tabs. Same look. Less work.

[davidblatner]

Here's a kind of crazy technique that we used on a book project: You insert "invisible" characters before the character you want to hang, and then use giant negative kerning to "pull" the glyph into the margin. In this case, we were just using quotation marks, but you could use it for any character really:

https://indesignsecrets.com/turning-off-hanging-punctuation-for-quotes-in-middle-of-a-paragraph.php

[Jeff Witchel, ACI]

There seems to be a bit of confusion about this feature. InDesign's Optical Margin Alignment is doing a lot more than just hanging punctuation.

It works in very much the same way as Optical Kerning, by comparing the relative shapes and sizes of the glyphs and adjusting the type in or out along the edge of the margins to make it look optically aligned down the column. Certain characters and punctuation marks are actually pushed slightly outside a column to make all of the type appear to be aligning beautifully down the page.

Here's a video tutorial about the feature: http://www.jeffwitchel.net/2013/07/the-ins-and-outs-of-optical-margin-alignment/

I also wrote an article about the feature for InDesign Magazine back in 2009, titled "InDesign Does It Better By Eye!" Check it out in back issues.

[Vishu_Aggarwal · Accepted solution]

You can also change the basic 'dot' symbol to the heart symbol...

Select the text than go to > Window > Type & Tables > Paragraph panel > Than go to the Paragraph Panel Menu on the top right and select bullets and numbering...Click add and choose the font glyphs you want to use (heart symbol glyphs).

Now Optical Margin will work in the heart symbol as well.

[HeyKate27]

This is what I ended up doing, worked well!

Tabs were an OK suggestion, but because of the nature of the document, it would have been unreasonable due to the number of special-case edits I'd have to make throughout a document of 10,000+ names.

[Barb Binder]

Hey HeyKate27:

Here's a post I thought you might be interested in reading. At the bottom of the thread, one of the ACPs came up with an alternative solution to your question.

can you hang bullet points?

~Barb