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How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

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Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#341

Post by dboreham »

tkzed49 wrote: post #136
Freak_NL wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has nothing to do with being on a Mac. Em-dashes and the compose-key work fine on Linux, and Android has them under the '-' of the on-screen keyboard when long-pressed. (Windows probably has some way, but those are rarely discoverable.)

I disagree, there is absolutely no easy way to do it on Windows. You can install a third party program that emulates the compose key but on macos it "just works". And I think that makes a difference for 95% of users

I've always (well...for 20 years) done a Google search for "em-dash" then copy/paste the character off whatever result page come up. Word and other fancy editors always provided a popup pane where these characters could be clicked to insert.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#342

Post by dboreham »

mmooss wrote: post #237
ogurechny wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just install a proper keyboard layout with proper typography support once. It is maddening that the whole world uses typewriter keyboards with some facelift in the era of Unicode and even blasphemous full color emoji font rendering. What has changed in decades? Windows logo key, power keys, media keys, IE and Outlook logo keys — all Microsoft's fancies. So initially IBM made some ad hoc decisions on what keys would b…

> So initially IBM made some ad hoc decisions on what keys would be suitable for a single user office computer Didn't it match ASCII and possibly typewriter keyboards?

ASR-33 right?

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#343

Post by lashloch »

rmunn wrote: post #340
krick wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually only your post that made me realize people don't normally put spaces around em dash. In French, Russian and a bunch of other languages proper typesetting is to use em dash as a standard dash character, and you always put spaces around them. So I did it in English as well, for many years now. (I also now looked up and found out that in Spanish, apparently, you are supposed to put space only on one side o…

I also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.

Funny—I'm the exact opposite. The extra spaces distract my eyes. To each their own! :)

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#344

Post by tejohnso »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #91

I refuse to care about this. A single dash is all I will ever use. I see no possible reason to use the other two.

Yeah, trying to get people to take Em vs En vs Hyphen seriously is a fool's errand. Only typography nerds would take it seriously and there just aren't enough of them to make a difference. I'd guess that the vast majority of people have never even heard of these distinctions.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#345

Post by ryoshu »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #3

AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: -- Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.

I'm married to an editor and friends with an editor at work. They both use em dashes appropriately—even with informal writing. I've now learned the keyboard shortcut just to confuse people in the age of AI slop.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#346

Post by rmunn »

lashloch wrote: post #343
rmunn wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.

Funny—I'm the exact opposite. The extra spaces distract my eyes. To each their own! :)

To each their own: fully agreed, even though our tastes differ. I will mention one advantage of the spaces-around-dashes method: word wrap with default settings will break on the spaces around the dashes so that the entire word one, dash, word two combo doesn't end up pulled onto the next line as a whole unit. Whereas the advantage of the no-spaces method that you prefer is that word wrap will pull the entire word one, dash, word two combo onto the next line as a whole unit.

Why yes, I did list the opposite behavior as an advantage of each. Because that, too, is up to individual preference. :-)

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#347

Post by rmunn »

lashloch wrote: post #343
rmunn wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.

Funny—I'm the exact opposite. The extra spaces distract my eyes. To each their own! :)

P.S. I also prefer smileys with noses, :-), as opposed to the noseless smileys, :), that most people these days seem to prefer. :-)

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#348

Post by psychoslave »

thomasjb wrote: post #316
psychoslave wrote: post #298

If you are looking for alternative to kebab case to write identifier in programming language which reserve the - (U+002d) as an operator, chances are good you can use · (U+00B7 · MIDDLE DOT), that we use in middot case . So isMorePleasantToRead, is_more_pleasant_to_read or is·more·pleasant·to·read is up to you.

This is intriguing to me, do you know which (programming) languages tolerate this?

Python

    python3 -c "some·identifier = 0; print(some·identifier)"
C

    echo -e '#include \nint main() { int some·identifier = 0; printf("%d", some·identifier); return 0; }' | gcc -x c -o temp - && ./temp
C++

    echo '#include \nint main() { int some·identifier = 0; std::cout
Ruby

    ruby -e 'some·identifier = 0; puts some·identifier'
Javascript

    node -e 'let some·identifier = 0; console.log(some·identifier);'
Rust

    echo 'fn main() { let some·identifier = 0; println!("{}", some·identifier); }' > temp.rs && rustc temp.rs && ./temp
Go throw an invalid character U+00B7 '·' in identifier

Java throw error: illegal character: '\u00b7'

C# is really annoyed with it apparently:

    echo 'using System; class Program { static void Main() { int some·identifier = 0; Console.WriteLine(some·identifier); } }' > Program.cs && mcs Program.cs && mono Program.exe
Program.cs(1,60): error CS1056: Unexpected character `·' Program.cs(1,60): error CS1525: Unexpected symbol `identifier', expecting `,', `;', or `=' Program.cs(1,99): error CS1056: Unexpected character `·' Program.cs(1,99): error CS1525: Unexpected symbol `identifier'

That’s it for the top in TIOB index I tested in the frame of this message.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#349

Post by bangaladore »

Kiro wrote: post #270
citrus1330 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. AI uses em dashes far more frequently than the average human.

Why is this getting downvoted? ChatGPT is completely obsessed with em dashes. I don't even know how to make it on my keyboard.

Yeah, people are saying "well you didn't know about em dashes before LLMs".

No, I learned about em dashes in school, I just literally don't know how to type them on my keyboard and I'm too stubborn to learn how to.

Re: How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

#350

Post by rahimnathwani »

Propelloni wrote: post #289
rahimnathwani wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the UK, and have always used space, minus, space. The first keyboard I used was my dad's typewriter, and I don't recall it having any 'dash' other that the minus sign.

I was under the impression that you do "-" for hyphen, "--" for En dash, and "---" for Em dash. IIRC, LaTeX (or maybe the editor, it has been some time) even helpfully changes that for you to the correct dash.

Google Docs also does these replacements.
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