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Regarding the Em Dash

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Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#141

Post by chrismorgan »

colanderman wrote: post #79
twhb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow-up tip: also on a Mac, go to System Preferences → Keyboard and check “Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar”. Then, hit the icon just added to the menu bar and select “Show Keyboard Viewer”. With it open, hold down Option, Option+Shift, etc, to live-preview what will be typed. For symbols not there, hit Control+Command+Space to open the emoji/unicode typer. Hit the icon in the upper right to switch to a…

Personally I’m a big fan of the compose key for such matters. (Both OS X and Linux.) The mnemonics I find easier to remember. • Compose . . → … • Compose " → “ and ” • Compose ' → ‘ and ’ • Compose / = → ≠ • Compose + - → ± • (couldn't figure out ≈) • Compose • Compose > = → ≥ • Compose o o → ° • (no compose for π)

~~ → ≈

I’ve customised my Compose key quite a bit.

I added things like:

- Greek characters from Vim’s digraphs, so p star = π, l star = λ, &c. (Looks like WinCompose’s defaults now actually include asterisk-first ones, star p → π, so I might drop my additions.)

- Emoji, :), :D, XD, :/, :S, &c.

- Improved curly quotes, whereby I super-conveniently type curly quotes all the time: ;; → ‘, :: → “, '' → ’, "" → ”. (Look at them on the keyboard to figure out the reasoning. ∷ is available as 2:.)

I contemplated, but didn’t add, Vim’s box drawing digraphs; there are a few collisions, and I only ever use box drawing characters in Vim, so I’ll just use Ctrl+K there.

http://temp.chrismorgan.info/.XCompose is my current .XCompose. I’m using Windows these days, so that’s with WinCompose.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#142

Post by OliverJones »

I learned old-school printing in high school. We had a press with a flatbed and screw. More to the point, we had lower and upper cases filled with steel type, including lots of different dashes and spaces. Our teacher was a traditionalist. He taught us such things as how to justify a line of type. Narrowing a line involved switching "thicks" (nominal space slugs) for "middles" in an artful way. Widening it involved switching thicks for two "thins", and so forth.

We had plenty of dash characters--we had hyphens of course, and figure dashes, and en dashes, and em dashes. Figure dashes are one en in width, with the vertical position of the visible element is designed to match the numerals in the font. This let us set a sentence like so with subtle perfection.

Type designer John Baskerville (1706-1775) owned a printing-works and type foundry in Manchester.

Does anybody notice this sort of thing? Probably nobody except book designers. Does anybody care? Well, my mom said she cared when I pointed it out to her.

From that teacher I learned to respect the choices of the type designer and how to use those choices. His tradition--now mine--dictates that all these dashes be typeset closed, without leading or trailing spaces. In the OpenType era, a type designer may choose to leave a speck of white space around a dash, but it's up to the designer, not the typesetter.

Text rendering in software like web browsers and word processors is gradually catching up to the tradition. Adobe's InDesign product does a great job of all this. Recent versions of MS Word are great improvements.

It helps to know the HTML entities for these items if you'll play around with them in your web pages.

    —   em-dash
    –   en-dash
    ‒   figure dash (using en-dash is mostly acceptabe).
    ‑   non-breaking hyphen
         one em of space
         one en of space
         the much-misused nonbreaking space (use an en space for  &nbsp ktksbai)
       thin space (0.2-0.25em)

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#143

Post by privong »

labster wrote: post #96
abritinthebay wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may not be rules but there are conventions. These conventions are rarely very strict but they do help communicate your ideas. Understanding them and understanding the impact of not using them is an important set of knowledge if you want to be clear and well understood in your writing. It is similar to good typography in that it isn't required but that it will often make the reader enjoy or understand the work m…

I think you meant to write e e cummings.

It seems E. E. Cummings tended to prefer his name capitalized (though obviously he did not always follow consistent usage): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_capita...

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#144

Post by rgossiaux »

jfk13 wrote: post #133
Symbiote wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The space is conventional in Britain. Without the space looks strange to me. (Android users — try long pressing the - key in the punctuation menu.)

In my opinion — and let's face it, much of this is just a matter of opinion! — a normal space is too much. Try thin space (U+2009) for a more subtle effect. (The exact result may depend on your font, however.)

This was the typographical choice that Medium landed on for their rich text editor as well

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#145

Post by pavel_lishin »

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

> correct (!) English

Ah, a prescriptivist!

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#146

Post by pavel_lishin »

smacktoward wrote: post #12
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...

Why? Unicode is (nearly) everywhere these days and offers so much more expressiveness, why stick to ASCII?

> offers so much more expressiveness

I don't know the difference between em-dash and en-dash. But I'd also wager that you don't stumble and come to a grinding halt when you see a - in the middle of a sentence, like a robot trying to parse words as arithmetic.

I've never, ever once had anyone complain to me that my meaning was unclear when using a - or ' in an email, but I've seen encodings get jumbled. There's no gain for me to not stick to ascii in 99% of cases.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#147

Post by Udo_Schmitz »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #137
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 land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash. > Horrible; I strongly disagree. A closed em-dash—like this—looks jarringly like the words either side of it are closely related, as if by an extra-long hyphen. For example, in t previous sentence, “this—looks” visually appears to me to be a single compound entity, which is ironic considering that the intention was to make them appear especially separat…

Hackernews defaults to Verdana—a known terrible font-design. Dashes should be visibly thinner than hyphens. And the reply-box is in monospace, so I can't see difference between the en- and the em-dash. In German we use the en-dash with leading and trailing space instead of the em-dash.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#148

Post by leephillips »

OliverJones wrote: post #142

I learned old-school printing in high school. We had a press with a flatbed and screw. More to the point, we had lower and upper cases filled with steel type, including lots of different dashes and spaces. Our teacher was a traditionalist. He taught us such things as how to justify a line of type. Narrowing a line involved switching "thicks" (nominal space slugs) for "middles" in an artful way. Widening it involved s…

People who use [La]TeX tend to become a bit obsessive over typographic details, as well. What do you think of that program? (Very interesting comment, by the way.)

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#149

Post by restuijs »

lwhi wrote: post #109
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…

I'm incredibly happy that the em dash is gaining the attention it deserves. However, if honest—I am also a little upset that the good people the comments section are tending towards placing white-space around each dash and the text it forms an abutment with. This space is not needed.

Your own comment to me illustrates why some sort of space is better. In fact, I can't tell if you're being ironic or not.

Your post is difficult to read because the em dash looks the same as the hyphen later in the post.

The argument that clinches it for me is editing. If you use an em dash with most word processing programs, you will consistently run into problems with the dash and surrounding text being treated as single words. You could reprogram things to recognize em dashes in those scenarios, but the standard behavior exists because of the way the vast majority of people perceive text.

Personally, I think the solution is a thin space, or to drop em dashes in favor of en dashes or something.

I use em dashes frequently, and these issues are frustrating to me. It's also frustrating translating them to plain text.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#150

Post by Udo_Schmitz »

open-source-ux wrote: post #140
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…

You can put a thin space before and after the em dash. This space is narrower than a normal letter space. Example with a normal space: The quick brown fox jumps over — and, sometimes, under — the lazy dog. Example with a thin space: The quick brown fox jumps over — and, sometimes, under — the lazy dog. This Smashing Magazine article discusses spaces in more detail. At the bottom of the article is a list of different…

What font do you use to read hackernews? Because in Verdana those are exactly the same. Tried some other fonts in inspector but think your thin spaces could be even thinner :)
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