‘Hanging Punctuation’ ? What is it? you may ask. That was my reaction too when I was reading through an article written by Mark Boulton titled ‘Five simple steps to better typography‘.
Mark writes:
Lists without hanging bullets; A ranged left body of type is pretty much destroyed, aesthetically, when punctuation isn’t hung. The eye looks for straight lines everywhere, when type is indented in this way, it destroys the flow of text.
With hanging punctuation the flow of text on the left hand side is uninterrupted. The bullets, glyphs or numbers sit in the gutter to highlight the list. This representation of a list is more sophisticated visually and more legible.
This is a bit strange for people like me who are not aware of typography. It is interesting to know that in software such as MS Office and DTP applications:
the bodies of text work within a box. Every character in this box had to be within the box, Hanging Punctuation requires characters to be out of the box. This was a problem for the software and as a result was ignored.
A good read for those interested in typography. The articles are short and well written and the comments at the end of each page make for an even interesting read. I have finished the first two parts, three more to go. So what do you all think, are we too accustomed to the indented lists and quotes that hanging punctuations will appear as mistakes to the people who read it. Also which one do you think is better, I ask this because I have seen more than one person mention about using hanging punctuation in recent times.
Let me know about you choices and views on this by leaving comments.
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