To 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.

To 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.