Definition: Creating the illusion of a uniform edge for a block of text, hanging punctuation places the punctuation outside the margins — outside the left or right alignment of the rest of the text. The punctuation marks, such as quotation marks, hyphens, and ending punctuation floats or hangs in the margin creating a more visually pleasing text alignment.
Some desktop publishing programs have tools for automatically creating hanging punctuation while it must be done manually in other programs (in Adobe InDesign and other Adobe applications the option is called Roman hanging punctuation). Hanging punctuation is commonly used when setting pull-quotes but can be used for any block of text. It can be used with flush left or right alignment, and fully-justified text.
Using hanging punctuationAlso Known As: optical alignment | exdentation | roman hanging punctuation
