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Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style. The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
by Symbiote 4y ago
Using an en-dash like this – you see – is the usual British style.
The unspaced em-dashes—like this—is typically American.
- laserlight 4y agoI 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.
- Symbiote 4y agoHN 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_spaces_around_dashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
- bee_rider 4y agoOh dang the hair spaces look perfect.
- FabHK 4y agoI 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.
- SeanLuke 4y agoThis is precisely what I do religiously in my latex: M-dashes are always {\,---\,}
- avgcorrection 4y agoI 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.
- euroderf 4y agoUnspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us - software types. Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not strictly kosher.