Re:The Punctuation Guide
by Harvey-Specter on Thursday September 28, 2017 @08:29AM
(#15356588)
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-s...
> American style places commas and periods inside the quotation marks, even if they are not in the original material. British style (more sensibly) places unquoted periods and commas outside the quotation marks.
Turns out that you (and I) prefer the British style.
British is an en dash separated by spaces, American is an em dash with no spaces.
And make sure to use a non-breaking space before your en-dash, so it doesn't get orphaned at the beginning of a line.
Another problem with no spaces is that it is difficult to use editors, word processing software, etc. because the dash and surrounding words are treated as one thing.
This came up in an editing and typesetting discussion one day. I've been convinced ever since that there should be at least a small space around em dashes.
Em dashes should always be treated as a wordbreak, though; is that much software really broken regarding them? Just as a quick test with what I have installed on this computer, grep, Emacs (in fundamental-mode and text-mode) and LibreOffice Writer all recognise it as a word boundary.
>I firmly refuse to go along with this nonsense.
here here.
Re:The Punctuation Guide
by insertnickname on Thursday September 28, 2017 @08:23AM
(#15356554)
Hear, hear
> Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation.
I firmly refuse to go along with this nonsense.
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html
> The em dash is typically used without spaces on either side, and that is the style used in this guide. Most newspapers, however, set the em dash off with a single space on each side.
Isn't this is US versus Britain, not "newspapers" versus "typical use"? And AFAIK it's not a "single space": it's ideally a half-space (in US style). The problem with no space is that your eyes can't easily disambiguate it from a hyphenated single word.