Does anyone know how to format columns so that punctuation (such as quotation marks, hyphens, etc.) are able to jut out into the margin? Thank you!
You question is not precise enough.
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Since you don’t want every paragraph to “outdent” its first character in the margin, you need to create a dedicated paragraph style, ideally derived from Text Body so that any modification made to text body also forward to this style. This new style will have in
Indents & Spacingtab a negative First line: indent. The exact value must be empirically set, depending on font face and size. It can’t be an absolute “truth” because the punctuation have not all the same width. Find the best trade-off.
Apply the style to paragraphs needing it. -
Another track is to use drop caps. Once again, for the same reason (not all paragraphs will show drop caps), create a dedicated paragraph style derived from Text Body. In
Drop Capstab, enable drop caps with 1 characters. The Lines: parameter defines the vertical extent of the drop cap.
Drop caps can be sent in the margins with a negative first line indent, but this negative indent is also in force on all lines making the drop cap which is not very aesthetic, with the added complication of variable punctuation width. -
Yet a more convoluted approach allowing more fancy but much more difficult to set up is to type the punctuation in a text frame attached to the paragraph. The frame can be positioned in the margin but getting “in line” with the first line is not immediate. Once the settings are correct, they should be saved in a frame style for other uses (without the pain to set again the parameters).
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Don’t work for hyphens.
Can’t set Lines value to 1 (at least in LO 7.1.8.1. Something different with 7.2 or 7.3?).
Could be adapted to hyphens. My upvote for this approach.
I gave it another try after making sure that all AutoCorrect options related to bullet lists are disabled.
There is possibly a bug in handling hyphens in this case (and even all variants of hyphens/dashes/quads). It seems that these punctuations are superscripted too high and the glyph is clipped to the drop cap area leaving only the part below the dash. In addition, font size is magnified which exaggerates the resulting effect (or it may also be possible there is no superscript, only magnification).
This can be demonstrated by assigning character style Drop Caps to the drop cap and customizing said style to subscript. Note that setting font size has no effect because it depends on the number of lines and the parameter is therefore ignored.
EDIT: apologies, I didn’t read carefully the objection and I answered for drop caps. However, negative indents work with hyphens. There is nothing special here with this character or the like. The precaution is to disable all options related to bullet lists in AutoCorrect.
This is inherent to the definition of drop caps. Though there could technically be a difference (by application of character style Drop Caps), it does not make sense in traditional typography.
@LeroyG: thanks for drawing my attention on hyphens. Bug report is tdf#150200.
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I guess your request is for the typographical technique known as “hung punc(tuation)”.
Characters with little “vertical mass” (often punctuation such as period, comma, hyphen, quotation marks) at the margin will make the margin look jagged if they are perfectly aligned. Hung punctuation compensates for this.
AFAIK there is no smooth solution in LO for this, neither in settings nor by addon. This posting seems to indicate otherwise, but I can’t find any details about it.
It is considered “advanced typography”, so you may find it in DTP apps. AFAIK, LaTeX supports this function, but its implementation is not perfect (not all relevant characters supported).
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This is what I was trying to ask about: thank you!
Warning: A mess if do you need to make changes, or if it is a long text.
A table with three columns. Aligns right the first column; and center (text) column, justified.
