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Regarding the Em Dash

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Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#151

Post by restuijs »

rz2k wrote: post #83
s4vi0r wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cringe physically every time I see an ellipsis, they're like the calling card of the tech illiterate 30-40+ year old. I don't know why they like them so much... But they end... Every sentence or thought... Like this...

I wonder how the em-dash has avoided this. It seems to just fade into the writing and make the phrases sound like the writer wanted them to sound. Both ellipses and semicolons carry far too much baggage with them, and make a lot of people have strong feelings about the author, occasionally positive.

I've never understood strong reactions to unusual punctuation. They serve purposes that are not well-served by anything else. Inappropriate use I can understand, but that's just like misspelling. You don't advocate for elimination of the word "loose", for example, just because it's often misused.

Ellipses, for example, are useful for conveying implied but unstated thoughts. There's nothing else that functions the same way. Semicolons serve similar unique functions.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#152

Post by alanfalcon »

ScottBurson wrote: post #63
alanfalcon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

No. I’d get dizzy real fast if that very natural association between movement and perception were suddenly reversed though. (Somehow that didn’t happen when I started using natural scrolling, only when trying to go back from it.)

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#153

Post by kashyapc »

leephillips wrote: post #148
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.)

FWIW, as a relatively novice LaTex (in combination with the Beamer program, largely for technical presentations) user, I can imagine why such people nit-pick over typography. The Computer Modern and its derivative Latin Modern fonts are beautiful---not to mention their inimitable flexibility.

I'll blame two of my colleagues for indirectly 'inspiring' me to spend more time than justified, tinkering with LaTex and TikZ (it lets you produce "vector graphics from a geometric/algebraic description"). I'm not happy with the amount of time I spend with LaTex+TikZ, but I find the results to be satisfying and very convincing. Have to diligently chip away at it to get more productive with them.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#154

Post by dpwm »

Udo_Schmitz wrote: post #150
open-source-ux wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Not the commenter you're replying to, but on my system I see a difference between the two examples they post.

This is because hackernews has font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif and I have neither of the named fonts installed.

On my system, hackernews is rendered using Dejavu Sans. This is presumably a default for Firefox on linux which I never realised until today.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#155

Post by lstamour »

leephillips wrote: post #148
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.)

The hardest part about using LaTeX is getting to the realisation that to replicate InDesign, you might need OpenType support that might not ship by default, as well as needing to run it more than once. Once you have /latexmk.pl [1] and XeTeX [2], you can then achieve amazing results [3] with the right modules and some creativity. It's just not quite as fluid to use as InDesign for graphically-minded people.

1: https://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexmk

2: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/TeXOpenType

3: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-bea...

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#156

Post by igravious »

dragonwriter wrote: post #28
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 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…

> Horrible;[…]

I never realised up until today (I am ashamed to admit) that the convention is for no spaces. I always offset señor em-dash.

However, I think my reasoning went thus. I put a space after ‘,’ unless the comma precedes a quotation mark. I similarly would never ever not put a space after ‘.’, nor ‘;’, nor finally monsieur ‘:’. Also to contrast with the way-one-uses-hyphens.

But an unbalanced em-dash, like so– would look preposterous so left open – is how I came to use it over time. But now that it has been brought to my I find that this– is not so preposterous and in a mono font this – does appear to be swimming in space. I may have to train myself–thus–though it may take some time.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#157

Post by leephillips »

lstamour wrote: post #155
leephillips wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The hardest part about using LaTeX is getting to the realisation that to replicate InDesign, you might need OpenType support that might not ship by default, as well as needing to run it more than once. Once you have /latexmk.pl [1] and XeTeX [2], you can then achieve amazing results [3] with the right modules and some creativity. It's just not quite as fluid to use as InDesign for graphically-minded people. 1: https:…

Or you can use make, or a bash script. OpenType support has been standard for years; the preferred engine is LuaLaTeX: https://lwn.net/Articles/731581/

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#158

Post by CharlesW »

mrob wrote: post #94
CharlesW wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, I use mostly mono-spaced fonts, and two spaces after a full stop makes perfect sense. It's still considered fine to do that when using monospaced fonts, just as using the prime symbol (') instead of an apostrophe (’) won't raise any eyebrows in that scenario. When your goal is to make something that looks like it was typeset by someone with an awareness of typographical conven…

>the prime symbol (') The typewriter apostrophe isn't the same as the traditional prime symbol (′).

Yes, my response assumes that KC8ZKF is using a computer.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#159

Post by DanielKehoe »

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.

When the web was invented, we came to consensus there should be a single space after periods that close sentences in rendered HTML documents.

You can see the original discussion, on the www-talk mailing list in July 1993 [1]. In the thread "Space after Periods," Terry Allen (an editor at O'Reilly) advocated for rendering more space after a period that closes a sentence than after a period that marks an abbreviation (in keeping with TeX and troff conventions).

I proposed that, "A WWW document (which uses proportional fonts) should have the same space between sentences as between words" and cited as authority "Words into Type" and the "Chicago Manual of Style." in 1993, "WIT" and "Chicago" set standards for publishing much like RFCs do for the Internet.

Terry Allen and I engaged in some snarky backbiting, then Ken Chang of NCSA Publications said he preferred "'one space fits all' as writers of HTML really shouldn't need to know the fineries of typography" and finally Guido van Rossum complained that, "extra space after a sentence... is mostly propaganda by Knuth and Kernighan (TeX and troff)" and implored, "Let's keep HTML simple!"

If you don't like the way that browsers collapse spaces between sentences, you can blame me (and Ken Chang plus Guido van Rossum who clearly had issues with whitespace beyond Python).

[1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/index.h...

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#160

Post by draw_down »

pash wrote: post #77

The em-dash is like the AK-47: it feels good in one’s own hand, but one is distressed to find it everywhere one looks. If you find yourself wielding either often, you should stop and ask yourself: “Am I the bad guy?” Just minutes ago I read two articles demonstrating the horror of a world awash in em-dashes, both in The New York Times [0, 1]. One may empathize with the writers, if one is so inclined: they have employ…

Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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