Comment by Symbiote
3 years ago
Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style.
The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
3 years ago
Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style.
The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
I consider a crime not to have any spaces between em-dashes and adjacent words. Traditionally, I guess, there were spaces of different sizes. Hair-thin spaces were typeset before and after em-dashes --- that's what I do in LaTeX using (\,). But, because different sized spaces have never been a thing on the Web, let alone plain text, people have preferred to not use any spaces, for some reason.
HN normalizes thin and hair spaces to normal spaces, so they can't be demonstrated here, but there is an example on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
Oh dang the hair spaces look perfect.
I wouldn't call it a crime, but a convention. In Europe it's an n-dash with surrounding spaces, in the US is an m-dash without spaces. For me, the former is nicer, but crimes are maybe a tad more serious.
I think Medium uses hairspaces. And of course there’s some automation since all writers seem to get that thing.
There ends my trivia about that unusable site.
This is precisely what I do religiously in my latex: M-dashes are always {\,---\,}
Unspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us - software types.
Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not strictly kosher.