Hanging punctuation

Chris Coyier came up with hanging-punctuation, which is a CSS property currently only supported by Safari.[1] Hanging punctuation means

… outdenting the lines in a block of text that start or end with certain punctuation marks, usually quotation marks and hyphens. This forms a more even visual edge when compared to the distracting dents created in a text block without hung punctuation.

As Chris states:

I think hanging-punctuation is nice! Just a nice bonus where supported and not a huge deal if it’s not.

Because it is a cascading property, Chris´ suggestion to start a new project with, is:

html {
hanging-punctuation: first allow-end last;
}

Note

18 Dec. 2023: I´ve played with the setting for a while and I come to the conclusion to better avoid it. Safari will outdent not only quotation marks, but also square brackets and at least on my blog I find it distracts the reading process, which is probably the opposite of what it´s meant for. I switched it off.


  1. caniuse.com/css-hanging-punctuation ↩︎

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