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For those interested, I had to learn this stuff and following are the usual suspects in these typographical crimes, in English: * U+002D: Hyphen-minus "-": The

For those interested, I had to learn this stuff and following are the usual suspects in these typographical crimes, in English: * U+002D: Hyphen-minus "-": The old ASCII character that appears when you press the key on your keyboard, at least on a US keyboard. Per Unicode, "used generically for hyphen, minus sign or en dash". Recall that ASCII had only ~96 'codepoints', as we now call them, available for characters, so many characters were designed for multiple uses, such as quotes, used for open and close quotes; carot '^', tilde '~', etc. used also as diacritics; and the uber-flexible hyphen-minus-en dash (and unofficially em dash, half-em dash ('--'), and univeral horizontal line). Also, recall that typewriters only had one hyphen-dash-minus character. * U+2010: Hyphen: "‐": Specifically a hyphen and nothing else. Typographically, hyphens are just a bit shorter than en dashes. Grammatically, a hyphen demarcates a boundary within a term, such as compound words ('editor‐in‐chief'), phone numbers (555‐555‐5555), etc. * U+2013: En dash: "–": Typographically, half an em dash, slightly longer than a hyphen. Grammatically, en dashes show a continuous range, e.g.: 'October–December', 'pages 15–93', and, if I don't misunderstand, 'London–Paris train', etc. It's also used in some grammatical and typographical edge case circumstances. Also, of interest only on HN: "typographers sometimes use U+2013 en dash to represent the minus sign, particularly a unary minus" * U+2014: Em Dash "—": Typographically, twice the length of an en dash, reputedly the width of a capital 'M'. Grammatically, em dashes show a break: '"No, no, not the—" ("Yes—the Spanish Inquisition!")'. Also commonly used for parenthetical-style breaks in sentences: 'The Spanish Inquisition—ubiquitous, omniscient, or so they say—was always unexpected.' Finally, used for attribution: '"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." — Eisenhower'. Also some odd, edge case uses. And because you asked, "In older mathematical typography, U+2014 em dash may also used to indicate a binary minus sign." * U+2212: Minus sign: "−" There are many more—Double Oblique Hyphen anyone? Search around Unicode, for example, for 'dash'. Sources: Unicode documentation, Chicago Manual of Style, maybe other similar sources. The summaries of their functions, based on those sources, are mine.

o11c 3y ago
Additional notes: * In my experience, the hyphen is usually very short in most fonts, the en dash is significantly longer, and the em dash can be much less than double the en dash (some of this may be a result of poor font design though. Monospace fonts have it rough!). * It's widely recommended to avoid writing U+2010 and just use U+002D for hyphens. Hyphens are by far the most common of these punctuation symbols, so it's ludicrous that `man` pages to map them by default; most man pages will never want any kind of dash. * Soft hyphen support sucks. * For different reasons, it's rare to manually write U+2212, since you should generally tell your typesetting engine to switch to math mode (which also takes care of inserting the right obscure kinds of spaces). * En dash is also used as a higher-level hyphen, when the inputs are already compound (not necessarily with hyphens!). * En dash with spaces around it is an alternate style equivalent to em dash without spaces, for uses like a comma/colon/reverse-colon/parenthesis. A given work should only use one for consistency. In casually written text, space-asciidash-space is almost always intended as an en dash. * Em dash is also the thing to use for interruption; there are several subcases here. This is the only time an em dash can potentially touch a space, though except for self-interruption they're generally inside quotes so won't actually. * When there's a parenthetical interruption by the narrator, the em dash goes outside the quotes (“Foo”—bar—“baz”). * Em dashes are also used for attribution after a quote, or for signatures. This is supposed to always be the start of a line, but if you're sloppy I guess it might be preceded by a space here too. * U+2012 figure dash is probably the only other dash worth knowing; use it with digits. There's also a "figure space" you should use for monospace-like padding in a non-monospace font.
- wwalexander 3y ago
  > Em dashes are also used for attribution after a quote I believe the correct code point for quotation attribution is U+2015 HORIZONTAL BAR: > The Unicode standard introduced a separate character U+2015 ― HORIZONTAL BAR to be used as a quotation dash. It may be the same length as an em-dash, which is often used instead. Some software will insert a line break after an em-dash, but not after a quotation dash. ― https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_das...
  - o11c 3y ago
    I was talking about attribution, not obscure (apparently standard in some languages, but not in English) quote styles. Attribution (including signatures) is always an actual em dash. —o11c
    - wwalexander 3y ago
      I don’t know what you mean by “obscure quote styles”. Did you read the link? You’ll see that it includes > Em-dash, an alternative to the quotation dash You confidently asserted the em-dash as the correct choice for quotation attribution which, if not outright incorrect, is certainly not the most or the only canonical choice. Nothing obscure in style about it!
      - LegionMammal978 3y ago
        The point is that a "quotation dash" (i.e., a dash that precedes a quotation, used in place of or accompanying quotation marks in many languages, as your link explains) is not the same thing as the dash used for quotation attributions. An em-dash is an alternative to a proper quotation dash when used to precede a quotation, but is generally itself considered the proper dash for attribution [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Attribution_of_quote_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Attribution_of_quote_sour...
        deleted 3y ago

o11c 3y ago

Additional notes: * In my experience, the hyphen is usually very short in most fonts, the en dash is significantly longer, and the em dash can be much less than double the en dash (some of this may be a result of poor font design though. Monospace fonts have it rough!). * It's widely recommended to avoid writing U+2010 and just use U+002D for hyphens. Hyphens are by far the most common of these punctuation symbols, so it's ludicrous that `man` pages to map them by default; most man pages will never want any kind of dash. * Soft hyphen support sucks. * For different reasons, it's rare to manually write U+2212, since you should generally tell your typesetting engine to switch to math mode (which also takes care of inserting the right obscure kinds of spaces). * En dash is also used as a higher-level hyphen, when the inputs are already compound (not necessarily with hyphens!). * En dash with spaces around it is an alternate style equivalent to em dash without spaces, for uses like a comma/colon/reverse-colon/parenthesis. A given work should only use one for consistency. In casually written text, space-asciidash-space is almost always intended as an en dash. * Em dash is also the thing to use for interruption; there are several subcases here. This is the only time an em dash can potentially touch a space, though except for self-interruption they're generally inside quotes so won't actually. * When there's a parenthetical interruption by the narrator, the em dash goes outside the quotes (“Foo”—bar—“baz”). * Em dashes are also used for attribution after a quote, or for signatures. This is supposed to always be the start of a line, but if you're sloppy I guess it might be preceded by a space here too. * U+2012 figure dash is probably the only other dash worth knowing; use it with digits. There's also a "figure space" you should use for monospace-like padding in a non-monospace font.

wwalexander 3y ago
> Em dashes are also used for attribution after a quote I believe the correct code point for quotation attribution is U+2015 HORIZONTAL BAR: > The Unicode standard introduced a separate character U+2015 ― HORIZONTAL BAR to be used as a quotation dash. It may be the same length as an em-dash, which is often used instead. Some software will insert a line break after an em-dash, but not after a quotation dash. ― https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_das...
- o11c 3y ago
  I was talking about attribution, not obscure (apparently standard in some languages, but not in English) quote styles. Attribution (including signatures) is always an actual em dash. —o11c
  - wwalexander 3y ago
    I don’t know what you mean by “obscure quote styles”. Did you read the link? You’ll see that it includes > Em-dash, an alternative to the quotation dash You confidently asserted the em-dash as the correct choice for quotation attribution which, if not outright incorrect, is certainly not the most or the only canonical choice. Nothing obscure in style about it!
    - LegionMammal978 3y ago
      The point is that a "quotation dash" (i.e., a dash that precedes a quotation, used in place of or accompanying quotation marks in many languages, as your link explains) is not the same thing as the dash used for quotation attributions. An em-dash is an alternative to a proper quotation dash when used to precede a quotation, but is generally itself considered the proper dash for attribution [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Attribution_of_quote_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Attribution_of_quote_sour...
      - deleted 3y ago