Drew Ink The year

Optical alignment

Aligning by what looks straight rather than by what measures straight, which is required wherever a shape is round, pointed or has a punctuation mark on its edge.

Optical alignment: a drawn diagram with the optical alignment marked in vermilion.
Optical alignment, drawn, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-10.
Optical alignment: the right edge of a column of the Gutenberg Bible, 1455, where a full stop and a hyphen are set outside the column so that the letters, not the punctuation, make the straight edge.
Hung punctuation at a column's edge, the Gutenberg Bible, 1455, Johannes Gutenberg, printer.
Public domainPublic domain: Printed about 1455; the printer died in 1468, and the page is out of copyright everywhere; Commons tags the file public domain, and this house reads a faithful scan of a public-domain flat page as carrying no new copyright.
Cropped to the right edge of the column. Retrieved 2026-09-10.

Near it

AlignmentOptical correctionHanging punctuationOvershoot

What it is made of

what it issetting a letter where it LOOKS flush rather than where its box is flush, because a round or an overhanging form reads as inset when its box is not
HOUSE JUDGMENT, and this site does it in exactly one way, three timesevery large heading on drewink.com carries margin-left:-.03em — the h1, the field h2 and the index head — pulling the letter back by three hundredths of its own size so its stem lands on the margin rather than its side bearingmeasured on this site's own stylesheet, which is the whole of its CSS. Three hundredths of an em is about the side bearing of a capital at these weights, which is why it is that number and not a rounder one, and it scales with the type because it is in em rather than pixels
and it is applied ONLY at display sizesno body text on the site carries itbelow a certain size the correction is smaller than the rendering error it would fix, which is the honest reason and not a shortcut