Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

Reverse the Punctuation

This next trick is kind of a kludge (which means a dorky solution), but it works: select the punctuation and paste it in front of (or at the end of, if flush right) each of the other lines. Select the punctuation you have pasted in and then choose the “reverse” style from your font formatting menu to make the characters invisible. (In a word processing application, you might not have the option to make type reverse; perhaps you can color it white.)

The reason I suggest you paste the punctuation instead of simply typing it is that very often when type is set fairly large (above 14 point), you need to reduce the size of the punctuation so it doesn’t appear unnecessarily important. By pasting the punctuation, you ensure ...