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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does HN markdown understand — or ‘? EDIT: Nope.
It doesn't need to. You can put the mdash directly in comments: — As opposed to regular dash: -
> Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote'). Tell that to GCC: /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/../../../i386-linux-gnu/crt1.o: In function `_start': (.text+0x18): undefined reference to `main' Looks good to me, by the way. > Where ``quoting like this'' comes from I did it for a while out…
> then you should still stick to ASCII unless you have other good reasons to. Why? Using non-ASCII Unicode characters acts like a nice canary for detecting character encoding issues. Besides, why would I purposely limit my text to ASCII? It doesn't even suffice for English, let alone almost any other language I use — including my native language Dutch, German, and Japanese.
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In ASCII instead of combining marks what you have to do is write three characters: * The unaccented letter * The backspace character * The accent character If this makes no sense to you, try to imagine a literal, physical typewriter. Windows line terminators also work with a similar principle.
From what I recall from my childhood, physical typewriters worked slightly differently: the accent keys were non-advancing ("dead") keys. You pressed the "acute" key followed by the "e" key for an é, for instance. If you wanted a bare accent, you pressed the accent key followed by the space bar. (The typewriters I recall also didn't have a 0 or 1 key, you used uppercase O or I for these numbers.)
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It doesn't need to. You can put the mdash directly in comments: — As opposed to regular dash: -
Well, since my keyboard doesn't have an mdash key, if there's no support for something like — or --- then I can't use mdashes.
Hitting the button to the right of [0] outputs a hyphen ("-"). Holding alt/option when hitting it will output an en dash ("–"), holding both alt/option and shift will output an em dash ("—").
- = -
⌥- = –
⇧⌥- = —
I'm pretty sure text like: ``quoted'' Is how you're supposed to write short quotes in the TeX/LaTeX typesetting system. [edit: My point being that the author seems to think this type of quoting originated with X11... which is actually newer than TeX (X11 was first released in 1984), and that the prevalence of this type of quoting likely originated with TeX when it was released in 1978... which isn't mentioned at all…
Same probably goes for French and other languages with their own sets of quotation marks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't need to. You can put the mdash directly in comments: — As opposed to regular dash: -
Well, since my keyboard doesn't have an mdash key, if there's no support for something like — or --- then I can't use mdashes.
And of course I used ascii analogues to type these into HN :-(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't need to. You can put the mdash directly in comments: — As opposed to regular dash: -
Well, since my keyboard doesn't have an mdash key, if there's no support for something like — or --- then I can't use mdashes.