Comment by anonthrownaway
4 days ago
Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash.
I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I learned about it, I decided to be a conscientious objector because using - vs — and assuming I can tell the difference is inane (because it is font based).
(ironically, the HN text editing dialog shows - as ~.8 of the length of — whereas on the site it shows as ~.25 of —)
Wie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?
Wrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).
Because it looks better and is a guide to communication.
For the poster child of a naïvely set/composed text which suffers thereby see:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/vir...
That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetting unions all bargained for sinecures rather than active participation in the Desktop Publishing Revolution.
2 replies →
The vast majority of readers can tell the difference between - and —. It's very noticeable. This sentence:
> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash.
is noticeably weird-looking. Even a spaced en-dash looks a bit small; a spaced hyphen is just odd. But if you type it like this:
> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time—proper dashes, though, not hyphens.
it becomes much more conventional and legible. If you're going to use hyphens, it's better to admit the typewriter convention and use two, like so:
> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time -- I just use the standard keyboard hyphen, but twice.
Because the impact of something can be felt even when the object doesn't appreciate they are feeling it. People choose fonts for the particular impact they will have on the reader, even though that reader won't think about it.