Hanging Punctuation in QuarkXPress

Hanging punctuation–the prac­tice of let­ting open­ing punc­tu­a­tion “hang out” beyond the visu­al edge of a block of text which actu­al­ly rein­forces that edge–is not some­thing that’s auto­mat­ic in QuarkXPress: it takes a lit­tle bit of romanc­ing, but it can be done.

To hang, for instance, an open­ing quote in a para­graph in QuarkXPress, do the fol­low­ing: First, in front of your punc­tu­a­tion mark, insert a nor­mal space; sec­ond, put your inser­tion point between that space and the mark; third, negative-kern the mark over the space. The mark and the glyphs should, of course, begin to move left­ward; stop negative-kerning when the glyph on the punc­tu­at­ed line align with those below.

As you watch the line move left you will notice the punc­tu­a­tion mark actu­al­ly seem to start to dis­ap­pear as it moves beyond the lim­its of the text box. Don’t wor­ry; this is a prod­uct of the dis­play engine only, and it will print even though it may only be par­tial­ly vis­i­ble on your screen.

(Thanks to Jeremy Schultz for ref­er­ence on this)