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The existence of multiple dashes, hyphens, etc. in English typography should be considered a bug, not a feature. Modern typesetting should standardize on a sing
by aezart 3y ago
The existence of multiple dashes, hyphens, etc. in English typography should be considered a bug, not a feature. Modern typesetting should standardize on a single glyph instead of perpetuating this nonsense, and it should be hyphen-minus because that's the one that's on keyboards.
The same goes for curly quotes.
- WillAdams 3y agoAesthetics argues against that, as well as tradition. (and you failed to note the use of primes and double primes) It's also a meaningful differentiation to be able to communicate a sentence such as: “’struth,” he said, “she’s 5′2″ with eyes of blue.” or, “Usually, 35–40 m.p.h. is a workable and safe speed for travel—unless pedestrians are involved, in which case adjust by −20 m.p.h.” which are far less intelligible when set with unidirectional/same width characters. It's also useful to have the uni-directional versions ' and " for special usages in computer science contexts, while the curly forms can be used within say a .csv without the need to be escaped.
- mikepurvis 3y agoI really appreciate the use of proper em-dashes aesthetically— I use them for parentheticals, interruptions, and to join related thoughts. iOS and MacOS have native means of inputting the character and on Windows I have a small utility that replaces "--=" with an en-dash and "==-" with an en-dash.
- perilunar 3y agoSame. Once you learn the appropriate uses for each and how to input them, it becomes easy to just use the correct dash.
- asplake 3y ago> Just use the correct dash Except that spaced vs unspaced and en vs em dashes are issues of British vs US English. Differences in usage as well as appearance.
- perilunar 3y agoSure. Use whatever is standard for your variety of English. Either is better than just using hyphen-minus everywhere.
- Georgelemental 3y agoOn Windows, I use http://wincompose.info/ http://wincompose.info/ for all my special-character needs (and use the system compose key on Linux).
- pests 3y agoYou can just use Windows Key + . in newer Windows It's sold as the emoji keyboard but there's a tab for symbols that includes all the dashes. This interface also has built in clipboard history too.
- Carioca 3y agoWhile I agree with most of what you've said, I'm not sure I see a use-case for the distinction between Hyphen, Minus and Hyphen-Minus. Specifically, with having all three. If I were designing Unicode, I'd remove the Minus sign specifically. That way, if you absolutely need to e.g. use an old font that used long minuses (in old texts they could be even an em-dash), it would still be _encoded_ as the parseable expected by every software to date
- adrian_b 3y agoI would remove Hyphen-Minus, whose only reason for existence was that the mechanical typewriters saved a key by using the same character for both purposes. Distinct hyphens and minuses are necessary both due to their different meanings and due to their different traditional appearance in any typeface that does not have fixed width. At most the en dashes could be unified with minuses, because they normally have identical appearance, even if they have different meanings.
- WillAdams 3y agoThe minus symbol aligns with the + symbol and numbers, en- and em-dashes align with text (and there should be different forms for use with lowercase, and all caps settings).
- srinivgp 3y ago> which are far less intelligible they seem fine to me maybe you're just used to it, and i'm used to the other it, and mine requires fewer distinct glyphs
- arp242 3y agoTo be honest this seems alright (or rather, no more awkward than the original): "'struth," he said, "she's 5'2" with eyes of blue." or, "Usually, 35-40 m.p.h. is a workable and safe speed for travel - unless pedestrians are involved, in which case adjust by -20 m.p.h." The only one that's kind of meh is the em dash in "travel—unless", which I had to replace with " - " here. But that's kind of a display issue: there's nothing stopping anything from a font rendering "<space>-<space>" as "—", just as there's nothing stopping a font from rendering "st" as "st". That these ligatures are in Unicode is a historical mistake, and I kind of see these dashes and quotation marks as roughly similar: they should be done mostly on the rendering end, whenever possible. Note I prefer using en dashes – like this – in a lot of my writing, which looks better to my eyes than regular dashes - like this - but having to use separate dashes for an aesthetic issue like this is kind of silly, IMHO. What people did in hand-writing varied wildly too. I betcha that in the handwriting for lots of people the "angled" quotes look pretty straight, and things like prime marks and quotes look pretty much identical, and distinguishing between "minus sign" and "dash" is even harder.
- endorphine 3y agoTo offer a different perspective, the parent's version looks better (i.e. readable) and more pleasing to me.
- eviks 3y ago> "she's 5'2" with eyes of blue." you don't easily know where the quote ends in the more complicated cases (e.g. quotes at the end of a paragraph) if you use the same marks, especially since in typography quotes aren't repeated (though maybe they should)
- WillAdams 3y agoYeah, it was late, and I failed to make the latter portion of that an internal/quoted quote which would have made my point more clear.
- _factor 3y agoThere should have been a base simple version, and variations of it to keep the keyboard functional. The variations would need to be specifically called out to be used over the simple case. The way it looks now is like a bucket with so many dupes it becomes a mess.
- baggy_trough 3y agoPersonally I find the "adjust by −20 m.p.h." a little odd looking.
- gorgoiler 3y agoWhile I the other typography looks great, in safari on iOS your “minus twenty” doesn’t actually look better than plain old -20, to me.
- rtpg 3y agoThere’s a reason that killer apps in the 80s were rich text editors: aesthetics and layout matter. Having said that, there’s definitely environments (shells and the like) where you want different behavior. Though even there it’s tricky: emoji being Unicode and a lack of random rules means that emoji “just work” everywhere. Other normalization rules might wreak havoc in certain languages people don’t know about. ASCII only for talking to the computer is a bit of an outdated concept at this point
- cultureswitch 3y ago> ASCII only for talking to the computer is a bit of an outdated concept at this point It's not. The mapping between ASCII and keyboard keys is clear. Wherever unambiguous English text is required (for example programming and documentation), ASCII is still the best. Each person may want to use renderers that will do fancy things, and that's fine because it's on the render side. The issue with Unicode is that it's a messy mix of presentation and data. ASCII isn't. So whenever you create a Unicode document, you are unintentionally embedding presentation information into it, and it's not the case with ASCII.
- perilunar 3y agoDisagree. The bug is that typewriters didn't include more characters, and that we've replicated that behaviour with computers even though we can now do better. The different dashes have different uses and meanings, so it is appropriate that they have different glyphs. It is not nonsense. Typography will continue to evolve over time. People seem to want more richness and complexity, not less. We've already moved beyond fixed-width fonts, even though that was all typewriters and early computers could do.
- toast0 3y ago> Disagree. The bug is that typewriters didn't include more characters, and that we've replicated that behaviour with computers even though we can now do better. Typewriters didn't need multiple dash characters, because you can extend a hypen into an en-dash by typing hypen, backspace, half-space, hypen. You can make an em-dash with another backspace, half-space, hypen. Of course, computers lost half spaces and overstriking, for the most part. Maaaaaaybe you need a separate minus from hypen, but that could be something you swap in, if needed (my typewriter has two keys that you can swap out, if you sent away for the keys anyway; not sure if smith-corona still stocks those)
- perilunar 3y ago> computers lost half spaces and overstriking And gained option and option+shift, which is even better (and many programs will auto-convert multiple hyphens to an en- or em-dash anyway). How common was half spaces and overstriking anyway? I don't recall seeing it much, but it's been years since I've seen a typewritten letter.
- abrookewood 3y agoSee the comment above "hyphen-minus [is] found on US layout keyboards", but not on all keyboards.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 3y agoIf you find a bug tracker for English, we can think about reporting this, but I’m sure they have alot of more important fixes to make. Anyway, enough people seem to like all the extra dashes, and they don’t cause much harm, so I think it will be an uphill battle. And who knows, maybe image recognition will free us from keyboards yet, and we can return to more sensible input paradigms, like pencils.
- eviks 3y agobut hyphen-minus can't be used as a minus since its width and height don't match numbers/+ Also any modern typesetting can autoreplace what's on the keyboard, so it shouldn't stick to the bastardized version just because it's on the keyboard
- ghusto 3y agoBut they're used for different things. We could probably get it down to two though (not using their real names, but what I suggest they could be called for simplicity): - The hyphen. Use it for minus and concatenation, and anywhere you need something that looks like a dash ;) — The dash. Used to break up a sentence — mid flow no less! — and that's all. In some ways the opposite of the hyphen And that's it, you can throw the rest away. Nobody uses them outside of fussy books, and even then the people reading them wouldn't notice their absence.
- layer8 3y ago> Use it for minus and concatenation Hyphen and minus usually have a different vertical position, because hyphens should be positioned relative to the x height, whereas minus should be consistent with plus and positioned relative to the digit height. In addition, minus signs are substantially wider than hyphens (again, like the plus sign). Minus width is often similar to en-dash width. You want minus signs to be like the plus sign without its vertical bar, but you don’t want the plus sign and hyphen to have the same width, or same vertical position. That would just make at least one of them look awkward in context.
- ghusto 3y agoI understand there are subtle differences, but for me at least they aren't noticeable enough. i.e. that they matter less than the benefit that would be reaped from having just these two symbols. Sounds like you disagree, and the differences would really stick out for you?
- perilunar 3y ago> Nobody uses them outside of fussy books En-dashes are used all the time (correctly) to indicate number ranges. The hyphen is too small, and just looks wrong for this use-case. e.g. 0–100 vs 0-100.
- jjgreen 3y agoThe Académie anglaise awaits your formal bug report with interest.