Comment by Voklen
3 years ago
I do often wonder whether we should maintain traditional typography when moving to a digital age because punctuation evolves as language does. If we’ve deemed it unnecessary to have seperate symbols for each of the dashes and everyone uses language that way then that’s fine. We can also ask this question about smart quotes, you’ll notice I’ve been using the U+2019 as the apostrophe here and I could “quote” like this. It's a question of how much ambiguity it causes, how easy it is to input, and how subjectively aesthetically pleasing it is.
My personal opinion for hyphens is:
- Ambiguity: most can be cleared up with spaces, and for examples like 3-8 if it’s numbers we can tell it’s a range from context
- Ease of input: one character is a lot easier to decide between than 3 (or 4 if you include minus), and if there are rules for software to be able to input the correct character every time then the differences in characters become redundant
- Subjective aesthetics: I quite like the consistent compactness of the single hyphen
And for quotes:
- Ambiguity: They show when quotes start and end which is quite nice and we can have nested quotes. But these are things that are not critical to meaning and simply make it easier
- Ease of input: Usually automated but can absolutely tear through code if pasted in the wrong place. If we deem these smart quotes useful enough then they can coexist with typewriter quotes peacefully if we do not run the quote formatting on code blocks (which is where code should be anyway)
- Subjective aesthetics: I do like the look of smart quotes but would be willing to use straight quotes
The pragmatic thing is to stay glued to the typewriter and then escape our nested strings with Unix toothpicks everywhere.
> Ambiguity: They show when quotes start and end which is quite nice and we can have nested quotes. But these are things that are not critical to meaning and simply make it easier
Typographic conventions go further than that.
In Norwegian it’s `«»` for one level of nesting. For nested quotes you are supposed to use something else. Maybe `‘’` (single quotes) for the second level and then `“”` (American English double quotes).
Maybe American English uses `“”` and then `‘’`.
In my opinion that’s not necessary. At least for text storage.
Part of my complaint about that is that although I think the different punctuation marks are great, using them is a pain because of keyboard layouts.
It's easy to find a hyphen (or something close enough) on your physical keyboard, but there's no em dash. OSes also make it a pain to automate even when they claim otherwise.
I go out of my way to use em dashes but do I think others would? No way. So is lack of use because of lack of utility or because of idiosyncrasies in keyboards?
Hyphens are great for some things but are too short to visually offset text.
The Mac layouts handle the dashes well in my opinion (quotes not so much). Option+‘-’ is ‘–’ (en dash), Option+Shift+‘-’ is ‘—’ (em dash). Option is equivalent to AltGr in the Windows PC world.
What about using tilde for numeric ranges?
"The global conflict spanning the years 1939~1945 is known as World War 2..."
Tilde is already used for approximation though.
The sentence as you wrote it could be misinterpreted as "the conflict spanning the years 1939 to ca. 1945...".
Had you used a dash/hyphen/minus/whatever nobody would be likely to misinterpret that as "the conflict spanning the years minus six..."
No, ≈ is used for approximation, ~ is just the most similar ASCII character, and it became ingrained by people used to using old computers. Just like * is not a multiplication sign, but × is.
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¿But which tilde? I'm a fan of typographical abuse of the ⁓ swung dash myself.
Ohh yes, reducing the amount of tasks the hyphen is used for helps as well