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Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes, because iOS/macOS translates double dashes to em dashes. I think there may be
by jader201 11mo ago
Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes, because iOS/macOS translates double dashes to em dashes.
I think there may be a way to disable this, but I don’t care enough to bother.
If people want to think my posts are AI generated, oh well.
- teiferer 11mo agoThere is also the difference in using space around em-dashes.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes It depends if you put the space before and after the dashes--that, to be clear, are meant to be there--or if you don't.
- oniony 11mo agoI cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.
- kuschku 11mo agoThat depends on the language — whereas German puts spaces around —, English afaik usually doesn’t. Similarly, French puts spaces before and after ? ! while English and German only put spaces afterwards. [EDIT: I originally wrote that French treats . , ! ? specially. In reality, french only treats ? and ! specially.]
- iLoveOncall 11mo agoFrench doesn't put one before the period.
- bratwurst3000 11mo agofrench does "," and "." like the british and germans the rest is space befor space after
- greenicon 11mo agoIn German you use en-dashes with spaces, whereas in English it’s em-dashes without spaces. Some people dislike em-dashes in English though and use en-dashes with spaces as well.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> whereas in English it’s em-dashes without spaces Didn't know! Woot, I win! Why does AI have a preference for doing it differently?
- dragonwriter 11mo agoIn English, typically em-dashes are set without spaces or with thin spaces when used to separate appositives/parentheticals (though that style isn't universal even in professional print, there are places that aet them open, and en-dashes set open can also be used in this role); when representating an interruption, they generally have no space before but frequently have space following. And other uses have other patterns.
- bloak 11mo agoIn British English en-dashes with spaces is more common than em-dashes without spaces, I think, but I don't have any data for that, just a general impression.
- LoganDark 11mo agoTechnically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.
- cachius 11mo agoEm dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities   and   These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spaces_around_dashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac... Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks: : ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – — And they usually add space to the right of these: “ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ < ≤ £ $ ¢ € ‹ « √ μ # @ + = ÷ - – — https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-space-kern-punctuation-marks-symbols/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-sp... 1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.
- fragmede 11mo agoWhat, no love for our friend the en-dash? - vs – vs —
- chickensong 11mo agoI once spent a day debugging some data that came from an English doc written by someone in Japan that had been pasted into a system and caused problems. Turned out to be an en-dash issue that was basically invisible to the eye. No love for en-dash!
- ben_w 11mo agoSimilar. Compiler error while working on some ObjC. Nothing obviously wrong. Copy-pasted the line, same thing on the copy. Typed it out again, no issue with the re-typed version. Put the error version and the ok version next to each other, apparently identical. I ended up discovering I'd accidentally lent on the option key while pressing the "-"; Monospace font, Xcode, m-dash and minus looked identical.
- 1718627440 11mo agoThis issue also exists with (so called) "smart" quotes.
- fragmede 11mo agoWhich, the iOS keyboard “helpfully” uses for you.
- withinboredom 11mo agoEspecially when you're sending some quick scratch code in a slack message.
- mh- 11mo agoPretty much the first thing I turn off on a new laptop (it's in the keyboard settings on iOS too.)