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Most keyboards don't have an em-dash key, so what do you expect?
by jillyboel 1y ago
Most keyboards don't have an em-dash key, so what do you expect?
- alwa 1y agoOn an Apple OS running default settings, two hyphens in a row will suffice—
- throwaway2037 1y agoI also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoI'm not reading most conversations on Outlook or Word, so explain how they do it on reddit and other sites? Are you suggesting they draft comments in Word and then copy them over?
- slau 1y agoI don’t think there’s a need to use Word. On iOS, I can trivially access those characters—just hold down the dash key in the symbols part of the keyboard. You can also get the en-dash that way (–) but as discussed it’s less useful in English. I don’t know if it works on the Finnish keyboard, but when I switch to another Scandinavian language it’s still working fine. On macOS, option-dash will give you an en-dash, and option-shift-dash will give you an em-dash. It’s fantastic that just because some people don’t know how to use their keyboards, all of a sudden anyone else who does is considered a fraud.
- throwaway2037 1y agoFair point! I am talking about when people receive Outlook emails or Word docs that contain em-dashes, then assume it came from ChatGPT. You are right: If you are typing "plain text in a box" on the Reddit website, the incidence of em-dashes should be incredibly low, unless the sub-Reddit is something about English grammar. Follow-up question: Do any mobile phone IMEs (input method editors) auto-magically convert double dashes into em-dashes? If yes, then that might be a non-ChatGPT source of em-dashes.
- nl 1y agoOn Macs double dash will be converted to an em-dash (in some apps?) unless you untick "use smart quotes and dashes". See https://superuser.com/questions/555628/how-to-stop-mac-to-convert-typing-double-dash-to-emdash https://superuser.com/questions/555628/how-to-stop-mac-to-co... I'm on Firefox and it doesn't seem to affect me, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it in Safari.
- cgriswald 1y agoAlthough I’m an outlier, Compose Key makes typing them trivial.
- egypturnash 1y agoOn an iOS device, you literally just type a dash twice and it gets autocorrected into an emdash. You don’t have to do anything special. I’m on an iPad right now, here’s one: — And if you type four dashes? Endash. Have one. —— “Proper” quotes (also supposedly a hallmark of LLM text) are also a result of typing on an iOS device. It fixes that up too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Android phones do this too. These supposed “hallmarks” of generated text are just the results of the typographical prettiness routines lurking in screen keyboards.
- layer8 1y agoMobile keyboards have them, desktop systems have keyboard shortcuts to enter them. If you care about typography, you quickly learn those. Some of us even set up a Compose key [0], where an em dash might be entered by Compose ‘3’ ‘-’. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key