From the course: InDesign Secrets

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071 Understanding optical margin alignment (and the quote trick)

071 Understanding optical margin alignment (and the quote trick) - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

071 Understanding optical margin alignment (and the quote trick)

There is nothing technically wrong with this column of text, but we can make it look far better with a single click. Look at this right margin, we have justified text, and we can see that the hyphens and the commas and so on push the text in, off the edge of the text frame just a little bit. But it's enough that it's visually different. We have sort of an uneven line down the right edge. Don't like that, but look what happens if I select the text frame, go to the Type Menu and choose Story. That opens the Story panel and I can turn on Optical Margin Alignment. When OMA, or Optical Margin Alignment, is turned on, InDesign pushes hyphenation outside of the margins just a little bit, so that you get a more visually even line. It just looks that much better. But it's not just the hyphens and commas and periods and other punctuation, it's every character. InDesign literally analyzes every character and sees whether it should push out a little bit to the left or to the right to make a more…

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