Email *. It enhances design by supporting OpenType fonts, transparency, optical edge alignment, and more. With the optical kerning settings, Kerning, as well as the spacing between all the character pairs, can be automatically determined. Emphasis is placed on optimizing all areas of component manufacturing, including optical alignment, dimensions, surface form, cosmetic quality, and thin film coatings. The multi-line composer feature in Adobe InDesign looks at an entire paragraph of justified text, rather than one line at a time, and decides how to best break each line. Optical Margin Alignment allows the edges of letters to hang outside the text margin so that the column edge actually looks straighter. InDesign How-To: Add Alt Text or Artifact an Image. Typography Skills: Hanging Punctuation. It is often used for block quotes, which benefit from “ hung punctuation.” Take a look at the left sides of these two text blocks: The sample on the left is typeset conventionally, with no optical margin alignment. Those tends to look better with OMA. InDesign does offer a way to optically align margins, but I don't personally like it much (or know much about how to use it). All Rights Reserved.Design by: Lotus Child | Site by: Larry Jacob Internet Marketing. The following four steps show how to apply Optical Margin Alignment. Not sure if optical margins has been implemented and haven’t had a newspaper in months.’ I haven’t checked a local printed newspaper either but shall do so next time I see one. Optical margin alignment is particularly useful for centering text with punctuation. And as Scott outlines above, the "text wrap" takes the entire character height to Top of Caps into account as it decides where alignment is made to the border standoff of the text wrap. From drop caps to optical alignment and everything in-between, you’ll pick up […] If this degree of typographic refinement is important to a project, consider switching to page layout software and saving Word for the kinds of projects it does best. Sorry probably should ask this question on a related blog :>. Optical margin alignment (hanging punctuation) allows you to show quotation marks, bullets, and hyphens outside the normal text area—a bit similar to a hanging indent. Bottom: Alignment is improved when the offending punctuation is “hung” in the margin. Deutsche Version siehe unten! Also note the direction of the plane and convex surfaces of the lenses to minimize the angles at the optical surfaces. Personally, I think they would look better with it. 26. First off… I love your tutorials on Lynda.com. InDesignSkills is run by a community … Sign up now and every week you’ll get a new InDesign Tip of the Week and Keyboard Shortcut of the Week, along with roundups of new articles at InDesignSecrets, plus exclusive deals sent right to your Inbox! Why is this necessary? Similar to what crych says, I think many of the art directors of today grew up in an age without OMA (or where it was extremely difficult to implement) and so got used to seeing columns of text without it. What are Widows and Orphans? And not only that: Optical Margin Alignment will hang punctuation marks such as periods, commas, quotation marks, hyphens, and dashes outside the right-hand text margin. Some help is available from the top design applications. With Optical alignment, the the number you add the leading space or the font size? ABOUT US. When Optical Margin Alignment is activated, not only is punctuation “pulled” into the margin to create a more visually uniform alignment, but so are serifs and the edges of certain overhanging characters, such as T, Y and A. I don’t think that XPress had the option of optical margins; if it did, we certainly didn’t use it. Along came InDesign to the rescue. To choose this feature as the default for new documents, check Optical Margin Alignment when the InDesign application is open, but before you create a new document. I see a lot of good-looking professional publications that don’t use OMA and presumably they’re doing so having considered the option. Optical margin alignment is when you adjust edge of text to be more visually pleasing, even if it pushes letters outside the bounds of your text box. Here you’ll find seven top tips to get you started with formatting incredible type in InDesign. See Ilene’s articles on the subject here: https://creativepro.com/typetalk-hung-punctuation-optical-margin-alignment/ Use the Type Tool, and fill the paragraph of text you would like to add a drop cap. Nigel French is a graphic designer, photographer, author, and teacher living in Lewes, UK. Fix that by turning on InDesign’s Optical Margin Alignment: Select the story, choose Story from the Type menu, and check the Optical Margin Alignment box in the Story panel. How To Use Conditional Text In Adobe InDesign CC Charts & Infographics. We’ll take care of the rest. So your "perfect" mathematical … One easy way to manually hang left margin punctuation in QuarkXPress is to simply add a space before the punctuation mark, then reverse kern the character to the space until the desired alignment is achieved. Along came InDesign to the rescue. InDesign's Optical Margin Alignment is doing a lot more than just hanging punctuation. Just scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, enter your email address, and click Go! It’s not difficult to manually hang punctuation in headlines, subheads, and other large settings, but many designers don’t bother finessing text settings in this manner due to the impracticality of making dozens of manual adjustments. I checked four Canadian newspapers: Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province, Globe and Mail, and National Post. None use OMA and G&M is now mainly setting rag right. When Adobe InDesign was created in 1999, the publishing industry turned the tide. Nigel, your tutorials are fantastic on Lynda.com. When you select an InDesign story (with either the Selection or the Type tool) and turn on the Optical Margin Alignment option in the Story panel (choose Story from the Type menu to display the Story panel), the program balances the edges of the columns based on the appearance of all of the characters at the beginning or end of the lines in the column. I recall, when it was first introduced in InDesign, reading a comment from a designer in Spain who said that the newspapers there preferred not to use it. In this tutorial, Jeff Witchel explains the in’s and out’s of optical margin alignment in Adobe InDesign. Optical Margin Alignment creates hanging indents on letters like A, V, W, Y, and punctuation, so that the beginnings of lines in a text frame appear flush. Jared, I’m in Canada as well and we use it at my organisation because I made sure it is our house style. We offer tutorials, quick tips free stylish templates and inspiration. The same problem can happen on the right margin of flush right or justified text. When I saw this option I was hoping for automatic text kerning but instead it seems to be Indesign optically margin alignement with some nice new options. To turn off optical margin alignment for certain types of paragraphs (bullets and numbered lists, for example), choose the Ignore Optical Margin option in your Indents and Spacing paragraph style options. Here, we have no Optical Margin Alignment … The switch to InDesign happened after I left. Is there any preference setting that can change the gutter to point size, or is it a case of working out say 14pt leading would need 4.93889mm for gutter space for this to relate? My question is, where in the industry does one use optical margin alignment? Lines ending with quotation marks, apostrophes, periods, commas, hyphens, or asterisks will appear a tiny bit “short” to the eye; consequently, the right margin will not look perfectly aligned. The latter will know to apply margin alignment to their typography. 394 A Appendix: Practical Guide to Optical Alignment f 1 f 2 From laser Widened filtered beam Figure A.1 A telescope with a pinhole in the focus for cleaning up the laser beam and making it a spatially extended parallel wave. So punctuation marks are pushed slightly into the margin, and several other adjustments are made as well. He is the author of, Tip of the Week: Using Optical Margin Alignment, https://creativepro.com/typetalk-hung-punctuation-optical-margin-alignment/, https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-4/fine-typography/hanging-punctuation. 2 and frontis on page 12). Top: Alignment of both the left and right margins is marred by the white space surrounding the quotation marks and the hyphen. Those tends to look better with OMA. This setting makes the text appear more visually pleasing to the eye. To align objects, click the button for the type of alignment you want. Just take a look at the difference it makes. Have you had any resistance to using OMA? I supposed at the time that years of looking at columns of type without hanging punctuation had made it seem normal to their eyes. InDesign’s Optical Margin Alignment feature (located in the Story palette) allows you to choose how far punctuation is “pulled” in the margin by adjusting the point size. Hung punctuation is one of them. https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-4/fine-typography/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. Of typography aesthetics beauties of Adobe InDesign CC 28 direction of the Week subscribers..., and more apostrophe can appear to be used for body text, start! Indesign Tip for using optical margin alignment in Adobe InDesign text frames on a page has! 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