Hanging punctuation or exdentation is a microtypographic technique of

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

punctuation marks and

bullet point In typography, a bullet or bullet point, , is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example: *Point 1 *Point 2 *Point 3 The bullet symbol may take any of a variety of shapes, such as circular, square, diam ...

s, most commonly quotation marks and

hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. ''Son-in-law'' is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes ( figure ...

s, further towards the edge so that they do not disrupt the ‘flow’ of a body of text or ‘break’ the

margin Margin may refer to: Physical or graphical edges *Margin (typography), the white space that surrounds the content of a page *Continental margin, the zone of the ocean floor that separates the thin oceanic crust from thick continental crust *Leaf ...

of alignment. It is so called because the punctuation appears to hang in the margin of the text and is not incorporated into the block or column of text. It is commonly used when text is fully justified.

History

The style was used by Gutenberg in the

Gutenberg Bible The Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the B42) was the earliest major book printed using mass-produced movable metal type in Europe. It marked the start of the " Gutenberg Revolution" and the age of printed ...

, the first book printed in Europe. Few

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

applications allow for automatic hanging punctuation. This often requires manual intervention by the designer or typographer, or the use of drawing software which supports this feature, or the use of sophisticated typesetting tools.

PdfTeX __NOTOC__ The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of In ...

, a variant of the

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

typesetting program, has microtypographic capabilities that allow for semi-automatic hanging punctuation. Arbortext APP (formerly 3B2),

QuarkXPress QuarkXPress is a desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and ...

, Adobe InDesign and

Corel Ventura Ventura Publisher was the first popular desktop publishing package for IBM PC compatible computers running the GEM extension to the DOS operating system. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small software company founde ...

are desktop publishing applications which offer automatic support for hanging punctuation. The blogging platform

Medium Medium may refer to: Science and technology Aviation *Medium bomber, a class of war plane *Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Communication * Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data * Medium of ...

implemented hanging quotes in 2014. A proposal to add hanging punctuation property to CSS was added to the W3C Working Draft in 2018. It is supported in Safari 10+.CanIUseMDN
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Related Concepts

A related concept is

optical margin alignment Optical margin alignment outdents letters like A, V, W, Y, and punctuation into the margins to align the text border optically. Some users remark that it makes the text margin look crooked, but this is because text frames or margin guides are ...

; letters such as ''W'' are set slightly into the margin to create an illusion of balance of white space.

References

External links

* * Typography {{typ-stub