Optical margin with multiple sizes

[Chris_Au@adobeforums.com]

Hello;

What is the strategy for setting the value when multiple sizes are used in a story frame?

TIA
Chris

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

I would set the size to the point size of the body copy (which will affect the most lines). It would probably also work, most of the time, for subheads, as long as they're not too much larger than the body copy size.

In an odd case, you could add a space in front of the first word of an errant subhead, and kern back heavily to tweak the exact position of a particular line, but I'd say that's usually unnecessary.

[Peter_Truskier@adobeforums.com]

This does, however, raise a question I've wondered about - why are the Optical Margin Alignment parameters properties of the story. I would think they would at least be a paragraph attribute, if not a character attribute (though I can see how the latter could immensely complicate the composition algorithms).

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

Yes, I have no idea why that decision was made (way back in InDesign 1.0), and it hasn't been changed since then. I'd much prefer a paragraph-related attribute. Plus it would get rid of the "lonely" Story palette.

[Chris_Au@adobeforums.com]

Thank you all for your comments.

Cheers;
Chris

[Dave_Saunders@adobeforums.com]

But I have all kinds of ideas for the Story palette:

A Checkbox that said lock me to one layer -- any action that would move a text frame to another layer would cause a pop-up warning the user who could then either override the checkbox and let the action go ahead or cancel the action.

A menu item that said: apply the text frame preferences of the selected text frame to all the frames of its parent story.

A menu item that said: apply the object style of the selected text frame to all the frames of its parent story.

There's three useful ones, for starters.

Dave