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I 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 w
by laserlight 4y ago
I 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.