Comment by Findecanor
3 years ago
A common substitution for emdash is -- which are two hyphens with spaces around them.
Personally, I think two hyphens also looks better than just one, and it conveys that you really intended it to mean emdash rather than hyphen.
This is similar to how it's typeset in TeX as well: two for en, three for em.
I have used two hyphens, but I appreciated text editors collapsed them into an (em-) dash.
Hyphens are simply for connected-words while dashes are -- for better of worse -- to make asides.
> Personally, I think two hyphens also looks better than just one
It's context-dependent. (Aside: you wouldn't write "context--dependent", which is the use case of the hyphen.)
Ostensibly the en dash is primarily used for ranges, although that's a case where I'm inconsistent. I won't typically write "A - Z" or the technically correct "A–Z", as I think in that case I tend to write "A-Z", using a simple hyphen. I certainly won't write "A -- Z".
The em dash is even wider—it's not typically mistaken for a hyphen.
Sometimes I write A->Z.