Of all InDesign’s myriad of palettes and dialog boxes, none seem to come in for as much derision as this one:
The humble Story palette.
If you’ve never seen it before, you can find it by going to the Type menu, then selecting Story, or under the Window menu, then Type and Tables ->Story.
There’s really not much to it: a cryptically-named check box and a box that allows you to select a point size if the check box is checked. Despite this seeming simplicity, this palette offers one of the quickest ways to make your text look professionally typeset, especially if you’re setting longer documents.
So what does it do? Let’s look at a real world example.
Here we have some 10 point Adobe Garamond set into an InDesign document. At the moment, the check box in the Story palette is not checked. Note that the initial “W’ in the first paragraph appears visually to be too far to the right. Likewise, the opening quote in the second paragraph pushes everything to the right, looking rather unattractive. With the text frame selected, or with our cursor active within the frame, simply check the Optical Margin Alignment check box in the Story palette:
Look at how much better this looks immediately. The “W” has moved slightly to the left, and the opening quote now hangs beautifully outside the frame. Adobe recommends that you use the same point size in the Story palette as your text size, but you can experiment a little bit up or down to find your optimum optical alignment. In this case, I think the quotation mark could hang a little bit more, so I could try a 12 point optical margin alignment to achieve that.
Note that this setting affects your entire story, including any threaded text frames that form part of that story. So, for the main story in your document, you only need to apply this setting once and your document will look better almost instantly!
But what if there are elements in that story – headings, for example – that you don’t want to hang? You’ll notice in the example above that the initial “T” in the blue heading has also shifted to the left. If you don’t like the way this looks, you can turn the alignment off selectively. If you’ve been a good designer and have set up paragraph styles for everything, it’s as easy as going to the Indents and Spacing tab of the relevant paragraph style and selecting “Ignore Optical Margin”, as shown below.
There’s also a way to do it if you haven’t set up paragraph styles, but I’m not going to encourage bad InDesign practice by telling you!
This feature is definitely meant to be used with large amounts of copy (as the “Story” name suggests): I’ve seen people trying to use it to optically align large headlines or similar. In my experience, the alignment gets less accurate the larger the point size used – it’s often better to align headlines or large display type by hand.
And no, I’m not sure why this tiny little palette hasn’t been incorporated into paragraph style settings, either. It seems to me that it would be useful to have different optical margins that are dependent on the point size of each different paragraph within a story, but maybe that’s just me. In any case, the Story palette is definitely better than the pre-Story palette work-around method of achieving hanging punctuation: it involves transparent frames with text wrap on that moved lines that didn’t have punctuation over to the right ever so slightly. Needless to say, I only did this on short amounts of copy that needed to look spectacular!