Not a bad article, but the layout of the article itself has some flaws (numbered lists are indented negatively, ...). I wouldn't normally complain about that, but I will in an article that tells us how to format text.
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st...
> With the advent of desktop publishing it became suddenly very easy and cost-effective to produce bodies of text. The problem was these bodies of text work within a box. Every character in this box had to be within the box, Hanging Punctuation requires characters to be out of the box. This was a problem for the software and as a result was ignored. An important aspect of typesetting just swept under the carpet like that. It’s a great shame.
And:
> A ranged left body of type is pretty much destroyed, aesthetically, when punctuation isn’t hung. The eye looks for straight lines everywhere, when type is indented in this way, it destroys the flow of text.
I do agree though that the hanging bullets add sophistication, but when I write that's not really my primary concern.
Why not indent instead?
Mark's web site doesn't seem to have comments there any more, but I'm pretty sure I left one at the time pointing out that you want a typeset list to have a clear break between items (otherwise why are you typesetting it as a list?) and therefore hanging list markers the way you might hang punctuation seems exactly the opposite to what you are trying to achieve.
I would argue that the same series of articles makes the same mistake with hanging quotation marks, for the same reason. If you read some of the early thinking about hanging punctuation, the goal of this kind of microtypography was to give visually clean lines to the edges of where text is justified. If you position glyphs mechanically, as computer typesetting inevitably does by default, you actually get a visually uneven margin where you have glyphs that "stick out", such as quotation marks, dashes, and the crossbar on a captial T: the whitespace above and/or below the "sticking out" part breaks the straightness of the margin to a human eye. Instead, you can hang the glyph slightly (not necessarily entirely) in the margin, to give a line that is mathematically irregular but visually straight to the human eye.
Somehow this idea has transformed into hanging glyphs, usually punctuation marks, being some sort of trendy typographical effect, which might still make sense if you're talking about setting displayed type such as pull quotes. Unfortunately, it has then crossed a bridge too far, becoming "this is the Right Way To Do It(TM)" for even regular text, which is just dogma without any sort of aesthetic and/or usability justification.