Hanging Punctuation, Optical
Margin alignment in InDesign

I've often mentioned that I'd like some way to have hanging punctuation in InDesign. As it turns out you can do just that, and it's as simple as checking a single box. Thanks to Magnus for pointing this out.

The reason I'm so interested in having my punctuation hanging outside the margins in a text column is illustrated in the following image. As you can see, fully justified text suffers when punctuation falls at the beginning and (slightly less) at the end of a line, because punctuation such as quotation marks inject a large amount of whitespace into the extremes of the line. This is unfortunate for two reasons:

1. It disrupts the strong vertical character of a column of fully justified text.
2. It interferes with paragraph indentations.

Here the undesireable whitespace is shown in orange:

Fixing this situation is as simple as checking the box in the story palette, found in:
window > type & tables > story

This next image shows how it looks with hanging punctuation. Notice that it adjusts all the characters not only punctuation. This means that characters like e and o are placed slightly farther out than characters like M or H to account for the apparent increase in whitespace at the top and bottom of round glyphs.