Comment by laserlight
3 years ago
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 {\,---\,}