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…
Re: Regarding the Em Dash
#181AFAIK closed em-dashes are the more widespreadly used version, and the fact that they are em-dashes gives away that they indicate no relations among the words they separate. Though this is kind of a bikeshedding problem where people don't differentiate between a hyphen and anything else, and sentences result incomprehensible, or they trip you and you have to read and re-read them. Even many publishers just don't care. I'm actually content when people are kind enough to use something that's not a hyphen for indicating what em-dash does. IDK whan en-dash is really used for, but apart from word pairs (like in love--hate) I'd rather not see them. My conception of dashes for daily use: hyphen for compound words or minus sign (too much trouble to distinguish), en-dash for word pairs, em-dash for marking asides in sentences (where they denote kind-of a different tone from paranthesised passages).