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Regarding the Em Dash

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Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#171

Post by steamer25 »

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!

I try to avoid hyphen-based range notation. It's sometimes hard to tell if a single hyphen was intended to be a minus sign. Double hyphens look like ASCII em-dashes. I've never heard of of the triple convention and would be confused if you neglected an inline explanation.

Here are some alternatives:

* English: from 1 to 3

* Some programming languages: 1..3

* Math: [1, 3)

I guess this also the main purpose of the en-dash* : http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html . The problem there is that en-dashes can be inaccessible as in my case--typing on a phone.

* I actually originally missed your point because you forgot the hyphen between 'en' and 'dash'.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#172

Post by auxbuss »

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…

An open em-dash is used to indicate the omission of a word.

It's best to use an open en-dash in the open case – which is standard in the UK (except for Oxford).

(This is taken from the Oxford Style Guide.)

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#173

Post by auxbuss »

igravious wrote: post #156
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…

> 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…

If you prefer spaces around the dash, then use an en-dash. This is standard outside the US, though not universally. Most US publishers use the closed em-dash.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#174

Post by auxbuss »

dmurray wrote: post #135
Symbiote wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

British: I don't live in the US. I am happy. Full stops aren't generally used in abbreviations here, Mx Cryptonector. Though there's a more recent trend to write "Nato" rather than NATO, which annoys me for the inconsistency that arises. Plenty of people pronounce VAT as one word, or PAYE, but these are usually left in capitals.

Nato (but VAT) has been preferred by the Guardian style guide [0] for a long time. I've never understood it. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a

The Guardian also does eg and ie, which, equally, I've never understood.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#175

Post by kps »

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…

Unicode (and so HTML) also has

  U+2008  ‐   HYPHEN
  U+2212  −   MINUS SIGN
HYPHEN is not much used since in most fonts it's identical to ASCII ‘-’. MINUS SIGN is meant to be visually congruent with +×÷=, etc (same stroke width and appropriate alignment).

Personally I have - – — ‐ ‑ − on my usual keyboard layout.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#176

Post by DamonHD »

ReidZB wrote: post #62
DamonHD wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's where I almost certainly picked up my habit from, though I haven't touched much (La)TeX in ~25Y.

Rgds

Damon

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#177

Post by jsmthrowaway »

kps wrote: post #175
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…

Unicode (and so HTML) also has U+2008 ‐ HYPHEN U+2212 − MINUS SIGN HYPHEN is not much used since in most fonts it's identical to ASCII ‘-’. MINUS SIGN is meant to be visually congruent with +×÷=, etc (same stroke width and appropriate alignment). Personally I have - – — ‐ ‑ − on my usual keyboard layout.

Hyphen is also a Western name separator, as in Jean-Luc Picard. Using a hyphen where a dash belongs, because of its ease of use on a typical U.S. layout keyboard, is a common mistake. A lot of people type two hyphens to make a dash, as well, partially because of ASCII, and it was nice to update my phone and Mac recently and see that Apple is now automatically fixing that by default without making me hold down the hyphen—disrupting my typing flow.

You could add the translation before, but it’s cool to introduce a lot of folks who don’t know that to a proper dash.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#178

Post by kps »

Freak_NL wrote: post #123
quadrangle wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The compose key and its composition tables are a thing of beauty — you can even compose an uppercase ß (ss) these days: ẞ (SS). It's such a shame that neither Windows nor MacOS (or the mobile operating systems for that matter) provide this feature out-of-the-box.

Mac layouts are arbitrary trees (or probably DAGs, but I've never checked) so it wouldn't be difficult to port an X Compose file.

(XKB manages to be both over-complicated and under-capable.)

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#179

Post by kps »

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…

Incidentally the author of that article, Marcin Wichary, (a) has many awesome photos of historical computing and typography, among other things, almost all CC-licensed¹, and (b) co-wrote the Pac-Man Google doodle².

¹ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/page1

² https://www.google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac-man

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#180

Post by Symbiote »

lwhi wrote: post #121
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.)

I disagree [1]; pick up a book that's been typeset, and look for an em dash. I doubt you'll see any spaces. [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/dash-and-em-dash

When the dash (whatever type) is used to separate parts of a sentence, in British use there will be spaces either side. If Oxford is the exception, then I'm not surprised – they're the exception to many British writing styles. Admittedly, these examples look closer to en than em length.

From some books and a magazine on my table: https://imgur.com/a/GNl2p

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