InDesigning.net

As a follow up post to the baseline grid guide, I would like to write a little about optical alignment in InDesign. As I stated in that post, »fine tuning a grid based design is all about optical alignment - the human eye is what matters in the end«.

When we talk about typography, what better example is there than Gutenbergs 42 line bible.

Notice the optical margins in Gutenbergs beautiful Bible.

Notice the hanging characters in the columns, especially the hyphens and dots. The hyphens are optically almost none existing, so Gutenberg allowed these to "hang" outside the column, to please the human eye.

The same counts for the drop caps. Notice the left side of the Q - not the tail in perticular which is just being decorative, but the left side of the letterform itself. It is pulled just a little into the gutter to create an optical alignment with the left column edge.

I have created a small test case, take a look at this screenshot and you will step by step see an improvement of alignment:

The document without any optical alignment.

Optical margin alignment

The first thing to do, to achieve an instant better result, is activating Optical Margin Alignment. Optical margin alignment is applied per story, so just place the text marker in the story you wish to apply it for, open the Story palette, and turn it on. The leading applied is just "guiding", if the main text size is 10pt the size should be set to 10 more or less here as well. But nudge it up and down till you find it fitting!

Here you can turn on and off optical margin alignment for a story.

Since the feature is turned on per story, you might have some specific styles you dont want automatically adjusted. Adobe added a feature to ignore optical margin alignment in the paragraph style:

Let a paragraph style ignore optical margin alignment.

After this small change I am quite satisfied with the main text and the subheading alignment - notice especially dots, commas, hyphens and the left side of the A, and the Y hanging a little outside the column. It isn't perfect, but still it is way better than before!

The document with optical margin alignment turned on.

Adjusting drop caps

The drop cap is way bigger than the main text, so optical margin alignment won't really affect it that much. Instead manually adjusting it will! The same adjustments will work for bigger headers, where you want them optically aligning with the text.

First of all you have to add a normal space before the drop cap, and then adjust it to drop the first two characters instead of only one.

Adjust the drop cap to drop 2 characters.

When the drop cap is adjusted and the space is added, you are able to "track it" outside the left edge.

The drop cap with an extra space.

Just place the text marker between the dropped cap and the space you inserted and track it until it is in place. In this case I had to track by "-310".

The drop cap with aligned.

How much you align your text is up to you, but I really find the optical margin alignment tool useful. In larger projects you probably won't always have the time to finetune each heading or drop cap, but if the time is there, why not? The end result is not perfect, but quickly done. Here is a screenshot without grids:

The document with optical alignment in place.