Hanging Punctuation
Setting opening quotation marks slightly outside the text block so the margin looks straight.
Hanging punctuation, also called optical margin alignment, moves quotation marks, hyphens, and other light characters a little into the margin. The eye reads a margin by the mass of the letters, so a line beginning with a quotation mark looks indented unless the mark hangs.
It is a refinement of fine typography, standard in books set by hand and available today in InDesign's optical margin alignment and on the web through the CSS `hanging-punctuation` property, supported in Safari and increasingly elsewhere.
The effect should be invisible. If readers notice that the quotation marks are outside the block, the offset is too large; typical values are a fraction of the character width, tuned per typeface.
Common mistake: faking it with a negative text indent that also shifts unquoted paragraphs. Apply the adjustment only to lines that actually begin with punctuation, and check the result at real reading sizes.
“blockquote { hanging-punctuation: first last; }”
Keep reading the glossary
A long quotation set off as its own indented paragraph, without quotation marks.
A short, eye-catching quote lifted from an article and displayed in large type for emphasis.
The punctuation that signals direct speech or a quoted phrase — single or double, depending on locale.
The curled apostrophe (’) used in typeset text, as opposed to the straight foot-mark (').