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Regarding the Em Dash

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Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#61

Post by [deleted] »

cryptonector wrote: post #47
dragonwriter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash. Horrible; if you are going to set a dash open and use it for the purpose of an em-dash, use an en-dash. Setting an em-dash open is ugly as hell. > I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens. Two-hyphens is conventional for an en-dash. Since a set-open en-dash serves the same purposes as an em-dash, a lot of people just use that instead of t…

I find space-less em dashes hard on the eyes. The extra whitespace around the em dash helps denote the "aside-ness" of the remark.

[deleted]

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#62

Post by ReidZB »

DamonHD wrote: post #22
combatentropy wrote: post #20

The em dash is the most beautiful punctuation mark, all the more because it is rare --- and it is best kept that way. Certainly a sentence with more than two is imparsible. In fact, more than a few in a whole article is probably getting annoying. It's like the exclamation point in that way. Once you discover the em dash, it is hard to restrain yourself. But I'm trying to come back to the comma. It does its work witho…

Two dashes are an en dash or a range for me --- so 1--3 is my hyphen encoding count range!

That's how it works in TeX as well: one dash is a hyphen, two an en dash, three an em dash.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#63

Post by ScottBurson »

alanfalcon wrote: post #35
gk1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few reasons why I switched from PC to Mac, but there's only one reason I'll never switch back—it's this em-dash shortcut.

I had to program this and other special characters—notably •, ™, and ®—as an autohotkey script on my work PC. I was going insane. I already had autohotkey going to reverse the direction of Windows’ stubbon backwards scroll anyway. (Once I used so-called “natural scrolling” for a week it became impossible to understand why anyone would choose anything else.)

When you move your eyes downward, the world seems to move up. Do you therefore call that "looking up"?

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#64

Post by seandougall »

cryptonector wrote: post #46
combatentropy wrote: post #20

The em dash is the most beautiful punctuation mark, all the more because it is rare --- and it is best kept that way. Certainly a sentence with more than two is imparsible. In fact, more than a few in a whole article is probably getting annoying. It's like the exclamation point in that way. Once you discover the em dash, it is hard to restrain yourself. But I'm trying to come back to the comma. It does its work witho…

Two hyphens is plenty. Three is calling attention to it. One is pitiful. While we're on this subject, wide spacing between sentence-ending periods and the next sentence is the Right Way (tm). In ASCII that's two spaces. We're not animals. Let's behave accordingly.

> While we're on this subject, wide spacing between sentence-ending periods and the next sentence is the Right Way (tm).

This convention started with typewriters, and typesetters (e.g. my parents) will tell you that it is only considered correct in monospace fonts. This is also why HTML takes the liberty of reducing whitespace down to a single space character unless you go out of your way to use an  .

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#65

Post by quadrangle »

cryptonector wrote: post #46
combatentropy wrote: post #20

The em dash is the most beautiful punctuation mark, all the more because it is rare --- and it is best kept that way. Certainly a sentence with more than two is imparsible. In fact, more than a few in a whole article is probably getting annoying. It's like the exclamation point in that way. Once you discover the em dash, it is hard to restrain yourself. But I'm trying to come back to the comma. It does its work witho…

Two hyphens is plenty. Three is calling attention to it. One is pitiful. While we're on this subject, wide spacing between sentence-ending periods and the next sentence is the Right Way (tm). In ASCII that's two spaces. We're not animals. Let's behave accordingly.

Multiple hyphens are awful — learn to use your compose key!

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#66

Post by dredmorbius »

pacaro wrote: post #17
pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

Maybe I'm weirdly old fashioned, but I try to stick to ascii whenever possible - which means whatever character is stuck in the middle of this sentence. Ditto for the ellipsis, since it's not like three trailing periods at the end of a sentence can be mistaken for anything else...

This is a great example of how limiting ASCII is. It doesn’t even contain the full set of punctuation that correct (!) English requires. It supposes that you are satisfied using ' for both ‘ and ’, and " for both “ and ”, and eliminates all the dashes for the hyphen—which has to play double duty as a minus sign. It also eliminate dieresis from the language, naive not naïve, and strips all accents from loan words

Question is: how much charactersetting is enough, and how much is too much?

I've been kicking around thoughts on Unicode and various codepoints, and which really ought or ought not be used.

It is decidedly complex. I've got in mind a simplified coding, though, for common interchange formats. Effectively a glyphic pidgen. Presuming "glyphic" is a word.

(1913 Webster says it is. Hurrah!)

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#67

Post by ScottBurson »

KC8ZKF wrote: post #52
paulcole wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then some point-and-drool twee bloggers made it unfashionable. Outside of newspapers, it was always unfashionable. I mean just look at a book, magazine, or even this site.

Hacker News eats the second space. Which is fine. I'm not saying that typesetters should show two spaces between sentences, rather the edict against typing two spaces between sentences is wrong. Two spaces even has a (small) amount of semantic information. i.e. "This is a full stop and not part of an acronym or radix point, etc."

It's not Hacker News eating the space; it's actually how the browser renders text. That said, I agree. What I type into the computer is not typesetting commands; it's input to the renderer, whose job is to understand what I'm telling it and lay it out appropriately. So, putting one space after a period indicates an abbreviation rather than the end of a sentence; the renderer may or may not choose to lay these out differently, but at least it has the option.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#68

Post by dredmorbius »

KC8ZKF wrote: post #52
paulcole wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then some point-and-drool twee bloggers made it unfashionable. Outside of newspapers, it was always unfashionable. I mean just look at a book, magazine, or even this site.

Hacker News eats the second space. Which is fine. I'm not saying that typesetters should show two spaces between sentences, rather the edict against typing two spaces between sentences is wrong. Two spaces even has a (small) amount of semantic information. i.e. "This is a full stop and not part of an acronym or radix point, etc."

Bingo on the semantic content.

That's a point that seems utterly lost on most today.

When I type, it's ASCII in vim.

When I typeset, it's \LaTeX (or more often these days, Markdown). Which takes care of the fucking fiddly bits for me.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#69

Post by sillysaurus3 »

colanderman wrote: post #34
dragonwriter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash. Horrible; if you are going to set a dash open and use it for the purpose of an em-dash, use an en-dash. Setting an em-dash open is ugly as hell. > I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens. Two-hyphens is conventional for an en-dash. Since a set-open en-dash serves the same purposes as an em-dash, a lot of people just use that instead of t…

I agree with you but I think you have mistyped "em" as "en" is several places. EDIT: Fixed now.

I noticed few others seemed to favor it as much, but never wondered why. My friend hates the em dash, and I suppose I partly agree. She said she dislikes when people use it as commas – but parenthesis are fine – which is pretty fair.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#70

Post by dredmorbius »

ScottBurson wrote: post #67
KC8ZKF wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News eats the second space. Which is fine. I'm not saying that typesetters should show two spaces between sentences, rather the edict against typing two spaces between sentences is wrong. Two spaces even has a (small) amount of semantic information. i.e. "This is a full stop and not part of an acronym or radix point, etc."

It's not Hacker News eating the space; it's actually how the browser renders text. That said, I agree. What I type into the computer is not typesetting commands; it's input to the renderer, whose job is to understand what I'm telling it and lay it out appropriately. So, putting one space after a period indicates an abbreviation rather than the end of a sentence; the renderer may or may not choose to lay these out dif…

HN could if it wanted to insert an   following a full stop. It doesn't.

One reason being Mr. Twee I-don't-use-two-spaces-after-a-full-stop, that it's awfully hard to tell if "Mr. Twee" is a sentence end or not, or if "stop. It" is supposed to be something else.

That is, in the typewritten manuscript, the double-space following the full stop carries meaning which the typesetting system (HN's HTML encoder, here), would have to guess at.

Or, you know, there's another way. Those of us who learnt to type properly can tip it off with our fuddly double-spaces.

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