Quick tips are random posts regarding something I discovered on my way to something bigger. They usually get longer than “quick” would imply, for which I refuse to apologize.

I ran into a problem editing a slide in Keynote with a large blockquote. It was left-aligned, which I’m great with, but the quote started inside the left margin, which caused visual flow issues. In typography, this is solved with hanging punctuation.

I haven’t done print design for a long time, but I remembered there being a “hang punctuation” feature in most of the apps I’d used. I apparently never learned how to do this manually in apps like Pages or Keynote. People who’ve been designing in these apps (and probably a dozen others) are scoffing at me right now. I’ll take it.

If you’re curious, it turns out it’s as simple as showing the rulers (View->Show Rulers or ⌘R) and dragging the indent marker behind the left margin marker. Here, I made you a video.

Vimeo Video

Hope that’s of use to enough people that it outweighs everyone who’s rolling their eyes now.