5 ms·

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.

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. 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.
  - renox 3y ago
    It depends on the users and the typewriter but it could be quite frequent: I remember an old typewriter which didn't have é so you had to use e and ' to make it, same for ê, etc.
    - perilunar 3y ago
      Probably only used by the same sort of people that now use en- and em-dashes!
  - toast0 3y ago
    Half spaces were pretty useful for centering text, or squeezing in corrections. And overstriking was how you underlined things. Filling forms with a typewriter is kind of overstriking, and was pretty common (typewriters were great for filling out forms with carbon or carbonless duplicates).
- eru 3y ago
  Some early typewriters mapped 0 and o and 1 and i to the same keys even.
eru 3y ago
Variable width fonts are older than fixed-width fonts. Typesetting long predates typewriters and computers.
- perilunar 3y ago
  Of course. The argument here though is should we return to richness of the past, or stick with the limitations of typewriters and early computer systems? Most people have already decided they prefer variable-width fonts (except when writing code) and multiple typefaces to setting everything in 12pt Courier. Using different dashes instead of just the keyboard hyphen-minus is the same issue.
rixed 3y ago
I too miss the time when computers were meant to be symbolic, and 7bit codes were more than enough to explain ideas, and the small minority of people who actually needed to perform typography had dedicated softwares and as far as I know it worked pretty well, in that nobody had to wonder what kind of hyphen or what kind of space would a simple keystroke translates into...
- perilunar 3y ago
  I miss the time when only writers had to type, and everyone else had secretaries to do it for them. /s Now we do our own typing, and increasingly, our own typesetting.
  - rixed 3y ago
    I don't think I made my point clear. Less than 5% of what I'm doing is related to typography (namely: only when displaying text for the end user). 95% of the time when I manipulate text, the text is intended for a computer to process further. I don't want typographic issues such as the proper length of spaces when delimiting keywords on the command line, or proper collation order to slow down my `git grep`, any more than I want to be bothered by variable width fonts when I'm writing code. UTF-8 to compose user visible strings in GUI is a godsend, though.
cultureswitch 3y ago
Using 5 technically different extremely similar glyphs for 4 extremely niche corner cases of typography is nonsense. Text is not written only to be read visually by a human on printed paper. Arguably, text today is almost never used that way. What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously. The distinction between minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless. It is literally impossible to confuse one for the other in actual usage. Same for all the 14 technically different quotes in the English language. Literally pointless to anyone but typography geeks. These typographic rules are vestigial. We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script and it made no sense either to make it easy for a reader to figure out which typesetting blocks the typesetter put on the machine. Both of these things are now very important.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  > minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless Hyphens and em-dashes have literally opposite functions. Hyphens join words together, as in compound adjectives. Em-dashes separate clauses in a sentence. (And en-dashes are used for ranges.)
- perilunar 3y ago
  > Using 5 technically different extremely similar glyphs for 4 extremely niche corner cases of typography is nonsense. They're not extremely niche — they are common and mostly obvious. > What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously Yes. What is ambiguous is the hyphen-minus. It literally combines two meanings in its name. > These typographic rules are vestigial. They are still widely used, and still function as intended, so they are not vestigial. > We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script I would argue the opposite: they declined in use only because of a (temporary) limit to the number of characters available on some technologies. Thanks to Unicode the limit is removed and their use is increasing again.
  - perilunar 3y ago

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.
- renox 3y ago
  It depends on the users and the typewriter but it could be quite frequent: I remember an old typewriter which didn't have é so you had to use e and ' to make it, same for ê, etc.
  - perilunar 3y ago
    Probably only used by the same sort of people that now use en- and em-dashes!
- toast0 3y ago
  Half spaces were pretty useful for centering text, or squeezing in corrections. And overstriking was how you underlined things. Filling forms with a typewriter is kind of overstriking, and was pretty common (typewriters were great for filling out forms with carbon or carbonless duplicates).
eru 3y ago
Some early typewriters mapped 0 and o and 1 and i to the same keys even.

eru 3y ago

Variable width fonts are older than fixed-width fonts. Typesetting long predates typewriters and computers.

perilunar 3y ago
Of course. The argument here though is should we return to richness of the past, or stick with the limitations of typewriters and early computer systems? Most people have already decided they prefer variable-width fonts (except when writing code) and multiple typefaces to setting everything in 12pt Courier. Using different dashes instead of just the keyboard hyphen-minus is the same issue.

rixed 3y ago

I too miss the time when computers were meant to be symbolic, and 7bit codes were more than enough to explain ideas, and the small minority of people who actually needed to perform typography had dedicated softwares and as far as I know it worked pretty well, in that nobody had to wonder what kind of hyphen or what kind of space would a simple keystroke translates into...

perilunar 3y ago
I miss the time when only writers had to type, and everyone else had secretaries to do it for them. /s Now we do our own typing, and increasingly, our own typesetting.
- rixed 3y ago
  I don't think I made my point clear. Less than 5% of what I'm doing is related to typography (namely: only when displaying text for the end user). 95% of the time when I manipulate text, the text is intended for a computer to process further. I don't want typographic issues such as the proper length of spaces when delimiting keywords on the command line, or proper collation order to slow down my `git grep`, any more than I want to be bothered by variable width fonts when I'm writing code. UTF-8 to compose user visible strings in GUI is a godsend, though.

cultureswitch 3y ago

Using 5 technically different extremely similar glyphs for 4 extremely niche corner cases of typography is nonsense. Text is not written only to be read visually by a human on printed paper. Arguably, text today is almost never used that way. What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously. The distinction between minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless. It is literally impossible to confuse one for the other in actual usage. Same for all the 14 technically different quotes in the English language. Literally pointless to anyone but typography geeks. These typographic rules are vestigial. We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script and it made no sense either to make it easy for a reader to figure out which typesetting blocks the typesetter put on the machine. Both of these things are now very important.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
> minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless Hyphens and em-dashes have literally opposite functions. Hyphens join words together, as in compound adjectives. Em-dashes separate clauses in a sentence. (And en-dashes are used for ranges.)
perilunar 3y ago
> Using 5 technically different extremely similar glyphs for 4 extremely niche corner cases of typography is nonsense. They're not extremely niche — they are common and mostly obvious. > What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously Yes. What is ambiguous is the hyphen-minus. It literally combines two meanings in its name. > These typographic rules are vestigial. They are still widely used, and still function as intended, so they are not vestigial. > We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script I would argue the opposite: they declined in use only because of a (temporary) limit to the number of characters available on some technologies. Thanks to Unicode the limit is removed and their use is increasing again.
- perilunar 3y ago