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Regarding the Em Dash

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Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#201

Post by WovenTales »

leephillips wrote: post #170
WovenTales wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something about LaTeX just doesn't click for me, and you'll never in regular use have any need for pure TeX. Luckily, there's ConTeXt which (unsearchable name and comparatively small support base aside) is a very enjoyable flavour and allows for some beautiful typesetting. Maybe not worth it to switch if you're already used to LaTeX, but if you've never used any of the family, I highly recommend giving one or the oth…

If by "pure TeX" you mean Plain TeX, I use it, as well as LaTeX (I know I'm far from alone here). i agree that ConTeXt is a great project, with many advantages over LaTeX.

Ah, didn't know it was still viable. Thanks!

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#202

Post by chrismorgan »

username223 wrote: post #165
chrismorgan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~~ → ≈ 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 a…

> - Emoji, :), :D, XD, :/, :S, &c. Aagh! I mean... and so it comes full circle. Does no one remember when "emoticons" were sideways ASCII art? Does no one wonder why entry (8) in a list gets turned into "open paren smiley face with sunglasses?" Kids these days...

Oh, I remember it full well. But even in those comparatively early days when only :-( and :-) had specific Unicode codepoints [HN filters out emoji, imagine the appropriate codepoints yourself], I preferred to use them to :-) and :-(.

Why do I use all the fancy Unicode things? Because they’re there!

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#203

Post by jacobolus »

cryptonector wrote: post #188
jacobolus wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do it. Unless you have an editor, nobody is going to stop you. It just looks awkward and pretentious to anyone with knowledge of typographic conventions (as in pretending hard to be fancy while revealing your ignorance of standard practice.) It’s like using obscure words in an ungrammatical or unidiomatic way; again nobody but your editor is going to stop you, but anyone who knows the way those words are typi…

No editor is going to tell you not to do something that lots of people do. As the other reply says, you're being a tad pretentious over nothing much. Chill.

In professionally typeset material people use either spaced en dashes – like this – or un-spaced em dashes—like this—but spaced em dashes are unconventional and unprofessional, frowned upon by anyone who knows what they’re doing. Sometimes professionals put hair spaces or thin spaces around em dashes — like this — but on the web those often are rendered improperly, such as on this forum. Try copy/pasting this paragraph into a rich text editor and swapping between a few typefaces to see what the effect should look like.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#204

Post by jacobolus »

anjbe wrote: post #105
jacobolus wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do it. Unless you have an editor, nobody is going to stop you. It just looks awkward and pretentious to anyone with knowledge of typographic conventions (as in pretending hard to be fancy while revealing your ignorance of standard practice.) It’s like using obscure words in an ungrammatical or unidiomatic way; again nobody but your editor is going to stop you, but anyone who knows the way those words are typi…

Pretentious? Come on. There’s nothing inherently wrong with spacing your em dashes. It’s even part of the AP style guide. I personally wrap them in thin spaces (U+2009), except in fixed‐width fonts, where I use an en dash with full spaces instead.

The AP is a poor source for a typographic style guide. They are a wire service not professional typographers, and my speculation is that their conventions come from a context of typewriter manuscripts rather than properly typeset books. They eschew en dashes and use hyphens to indicate ranges (e.g. 10-20 instead of 10–20) – something no professional typographer would condone – because they are expecting someone with a typewriter to only be able to type hyphens, whereupon the choice is either one hyphen or two. So in a manuscript you get spaces around pairs of hyphens -- like so -- standing in for dashes. Their style guide is designed so that someone doing the newspaper typesetting can directly copy the typewritten manuscript over to the press without thinking about what kind of dash to use.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#205

Post by [deleted] »

Symbiote wrote: post #180
lwhi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#206

Post by cryptonector »

abritinthebay wrote: post #196
cryptonector wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying only the qualified are allowed to break conventions you were taught. You are free to follow that; I am free to not.

Nothing about allowed there. It’s about communication & understanding. You are free to break whatever convention you like. It will just effect your communication clarity. Understanding that (and how and why too) will help you be more effective. It’s no different to saying “you can program it that way if you want but understanding the conventions & methods other people use may help you have more readable and efficient…

Really. Whitespace around em dashes hurts my ability to communicate? Please explain.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#207

Post by weeksie »

girzel wrote: post #89
weeksie wrote: post #7

I used to be an em dash over-user but have calmed down quite a bit in that department over the last several years. My current idée fixe is the archaic ellipsis as (over) used by Céline . . . I just can't bring myself to go with the single character scrunchy version.

Properly formatted (ie, in LaTeX), the real ellipsis character is the only way to go. With fixed-width fonts it's ugly, but with fixed-width fonts most of the typography is in your imagination, anyway. The hideous [dot][space][dot][space][dot][space] approach needs to die.

Ha! Tell that to Céline ;)

But as someone who used to write nearly every document in LaTeX, I can tell you that I still prefer the correct version ;)

(degustibus non est desputandum, eh?)

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#208

Post by bartvk »

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.)

This comment made me smile, because it's so true :)

After my college days using LaTeX, support for ligatures arrived in browsers and I would spot those (fi, ff, ij, ft, and perhaps others) and post them on Facebook.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#209

Post by dragonwriter »

steamer25 wrote: post #168
Udo_Schmitz wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anyone else was surprised as I was to hear that Verdana was disliked, here's the most compelling argument I found against it: While it was meticulously designed for on-screen legibility, these days higher resolution screens and anti-aliasing, etc. are a better solution than meddling with the letter shapes e.g., taller x-heights, bigger openings, etc. One detractor did allow for Verdana when rendering fine-print/le…

Verdana was exquisitely well designed for the special problem of on-screen readability on the kind of screens that dominated in the mid-1990s, but, yeah, it's not 1996 any more.

On most screens these days, you are probably better off, if using a font of Verdana’s vintage or older, using one optimized for print legibility.

Re: Regarding the Em Dash

#210

Post by quietbritishjim »

WovenTales wrote: post #200

I love dashes. I do tend to avoid ems for parenthetical remarks – for those, I'll use spaced ens – but I do definitely use the longer for interjections and (roughly) semicolons, as the article describes. Where I break from convention is that, if they're marking an interjection or other interruption, I will put a space in on a single side of the dash— like so —to better demarcate the logical flow. Then again, I also p…

I realise this is nothing more than my opinion, but I have to tell you that asymmetric spacing around a dash looks awful.
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