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You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B). Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode peo
by usui 2mo ago
You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B).
Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.
- eddyg 2mo ago"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry." https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes
- usui 2mo agoI mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.
- locknitpicker 2mo ago> I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.
- pimlottc 2mo agoIt’s can’t be any more difficult than getting people to agree on how many spaces to use for indentation…
- adverbly 2mo agoThat is so stupid. Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large). Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power. The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.
- adregan 2mo agoI can’t tell if this is sarcasm. If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash. EDIT: Additionally, unicode primarily exists to encode the typographic symbols that exist—that is to say, it's a catalog of what already is. Take Ogham[1] for example. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)
- TehCorwiz 2mo agoDid you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old? Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents. So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters. Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!
- palmotea 2mo ago> So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters. Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation. > Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out! No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#/media/File:United_States_Declaration_of_Independence.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_United_States,_page_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line) In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.
- DonHopkins 2mo agoThree-em dashes are multinational conglomerate punctuation. They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape. In German, nouns have gender, so why not more inclusive punctuation? The him dash, her dash, it dash, and the nonbinary them dash. It would really infuriate MAGA if you could apply emoji gender and skin color. And of course if you really want to make a statement and stick it to those anti-AI em-dash nit-pickers, there's always the Zen-like struck-out no-break space (U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE + U+0336 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY) ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ you can combine them to any length! It's a shame Hacker News filters out the really good ones, like the üm dash: — (U+2014 EM DASH + U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS) and the over-accentuated üm-á-ñå-ḍ-ç dash: — (EM DASH + DIAERESIS + ACUTE + TILDE + RING ABOVE + DOT BELOW + CEDILLA). @dang I know @mentions don't work so you'll never read this, so screw you for filtering out my favorite glitchy punctuation diacritics, you jerk! I feel like my creativity is stifled and freedom of speech suppressed!
- onraglanroad 2mo ago> They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape. Triple emdash cannot be used as a lubricant. Do not touch, inhale, or look at triple emdash. Do not taunt triple emdash.
- teach 2mo agoMay stick to certain types of skin
- walkerbrown 2mo agoI’m curious, what is the objection to Han unification?
- xg15 2mo agoOnly know the discussion superficially, but from what I understood, the problem was as follows: Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja scripts have the same historical roots (Han) and still look very similar when you write them — however, they are fully separate scripts with different use of letters and optical differences that are important. However, when encoding them into Unicode, the consortium suddenly discovered the importance of being frugal with character IDs and only defined a single "Han" sequence of characters for all three scripts. You need to select a matching font to actually display the text in the script that's intended. This makes using those characters an unnecessary hassle and also came over as a cultural faux-pas to some (essentially like encoding Greek Eta, Latin H and Cyrillic En as the same character, because they look similar and the scripts have a common history) <s>It also looks a bit hypocritical when Unicode otherwise goes the opposite way and has the space to encode dozens of variants of the Latin alphabet or — as we see here — several categories of dashes.</s> (Edit: Han unification was done when Unicode was still 16 bit, so there were real space constraints — so no hypocrisy actually) See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
- zahlman 2mo agoI honestly agree with the arguments they made to defend it, but then they tied themselves in loops trying to defend things like separate Greek and Cyrillic scripts and making superfine distinctions about how that isn't the same phenomenon. But they couldn't merge those scripts together now even if they wanted to, because of the stability policy. And the existence of the blackletter, small-caps, superscript, etc. characters seems entirely indefensible to me. All font rendering issues; it's clearly the same symbol with the same fundamental meaning. Really, they needed to come up with the idea of variation selectors way earlier, and use them aggressively. And design something more consistent for character composition, and skip the precomposed characters (those really are glyphs representing a cluster; being able to treat the cluster as an atomic entity versus its components doesn't add actual semantic information to the text).
- acabal 2mo agoAt Standard Ebooks we use the three-em-dash to indicate a fully obscured word, for example this line from Tristram Shandy: > He lies buried in the corner of his churchyard, in the parish of ⸻, under a plain marble slab If we were to use three em dashes in a row, the renderer typically puts a 1-2px gap between them. Using U+2E3B leaves no gaps. Likewise, we use a 2-em dash, U+2E3A, for partially obscured words, for example this line from Gogol's short fiction: > The town of B⸺ had become very lively since a cavalry regiment had taken up its quarters in it.
- defen 2mo agoThat’s a common trope I see in “old” books (most recently for me in _Old Mortality_) that I can’t recall ever seeing in modern ones - deliberately obscured words intended to convey a notion of realism without naming an actual place or person. I guess it’s the 555 phone number of old books.
- ericyd 2mo agoMy heart bleeds for the monospace font developers who have to design this glyph.
- jerf 2mo agoYou also shouldn't forget the Eminem dash: –—–. Recommended for use in censoring words in rap songs.
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- yreg 2mo agoBeautiful, goes straight into my Text replacements. Shame that I wasn't able to make Apple Shortcuts simulate typing this on ⌥^⇧-
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]