Comment by LeoPanthera
5 months ago
I took a peak at zmgsabst's comments, but they use them with spaces around the dash — like this.
ChatGPT always uses them without spaces—like this.
5 months ago
I took a peak at zmgsabst's comments, but they use them with spaces around the dash — like this.
ChatGPT always uses them without spaces—like this.
Changing the filter to
puts westoncb in the lead, followed by mucholove, trebbble, _zzaw and lexcorvus.
I actually tweeted like a month ago that I was the reason LLMs use em dashes so much lol: https://x.com/Westoncb/status/1961802304698671407
There are quite a few —es on my WWW site and on StackExchange thanks to me; and I vaguely recall that I might even have written one on Wikipedia once. But I am quite happy for you to take the blame for training the LLMs. (-:
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The rule is spaces on both sides of an en dash – like so – or an em dash without any spaces—like this. Important to note the US keyboard layout does not have either of these or the minus glyph, just the hyphen, and it’s unadvisable to mix multiple styles
& it looks awful without spaces — imho
Which is what I do (add a space before and after). I didn't know you weren't supposed to put the spaces until someone pointed it out to me — suggested I was not an LLM because I added the spaces.
Makes me wonder if kerning is done correctly, if the em-dash would look like there were spaces before and after when there were not.
Not at all, no. Here's a few historical examples:
1903 edition of The Wizard of Oz — https://archive.org/details/newwizardofoz00baum/page/2/mode/...
A page from Life magazine, 1894 — https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1894-08-23_24_608/page/...
The Illustrated London News, 1843 — https://archive.org/details/illustrated-london-news-v002-184...
The em dash pretty much just joins the two glyphs together. It's supposed to look that way.
You can also use an em-dash with thin spaces (U+2009) or hair spaces (U+200A), but it doesn't work on HN—they just display as regular spaces.
The common guidance I've seen is en dash with spaces, em dash without.
I always thought the proper usage was no space before but one space after-- like this.
There's no "proper usage" for any feature of English: it's all by consensus. However, I have seen that in published books from the 1900s.