- Law 19: Hang punctuation in small chunks of text.
When you have a small chunk of text
that contains punctuation marks,
the punctuation marks should be hung
off of the aligned edge.
What does that mean?
Hanging punctuation may be a new phrase
that you've never heard before.
Let's look at a few examples to explain the concept.
In this first example, we've got a page from a document,
and we're featuring a pull quote on this page.
The pull quote is helping us break up
some of the text on the page and add some visual interest.
Notice how the opening quotation marks
have been left-aligned with the rest of the text.
In this example, the punctuation is not hung.
In the second example, we've got the same text,
but now the punctuation has been hung.
Do you see how the opening quotation mark
is actually hung outside of the main text block?
See how it's been scooted to the left just a bit?
Looking at both of these examples,
notice how the first line in this example
appears to be indented just a bit.
This visual effect is being caused by the amount
of white space that's below the opening quotation mark.
The text is mathematically aligned.
Everything is aligned left here.
But it doesn't look aligned.
So it's not correct.
It's not correctly aligned and needs to be fixed.
We can fix this issue by hanging the quotation mark,
just like in the second example.
By moving the quotation mark just outside of the
main text block like we did here, scooting it to the left,
we've created a clean, hard edge with our text.
The left edge is strong and aligned.
The punctuation is hung,
and the pull quote now looks correct.
Here's another example.
This time, we have some text on a poster.
This text has been right-aligned.
You'll notice it's a sentence
and there's a period at the end of the sentence.
Now, the text is mathematically right-aligned.
There's an imaginary vertical line here
and everything's lined up against it.
But notice how the period makes it look like
the very last line is indented a bit.
Because a period is such a small character
with so much white space on top,
the period is taking a visual chunk
out of our nice, clean right edge.
Here's the same text.
It's still right-aligned, still have the period.
But now the ending period has been
hung off of the right edge.
Our strong right text edge is preserved.
And now the alignment looks correct.
This law applies to small chunks of text
that have been separated out
from body text in long documents.
This may be text like quotations, maybe headlines.
This law also applies to text on posters,
business cards, invitations, and any other
single page documents that don't contain
large amounts of body text.
In body text, punctuation is usually not hung.
That's because body text is small enough
that the visual interruption caused by punctuation
is pretty minimal.
So you don't have to worry about
hanging punctuation in body text.
Let's summarize.
When you're working with small chunks of text,
punctuation should be hung in order to preserve
proper visual alignment.
Hanging punctuation means moving punctuation marks
outside of the text block so that the punctuation
does not interfere with the text alignment.
This attention to detail will create strong,
visually correct text alignments in your documents,
and it's really going to take your documents
to the next level professionally.
That's law 19.
Hang punctuation in small chunks of text.