> Horrible;
I strongly disagree. A closed em-dash—like this—looks jarringly like the words either side of it are closely related, as if by an extra-long hyphen. For example, in t previous sentence, “this—looks” visually appears to me to be a single compound entity, which is ironic considering that the intention was to make them appear especially separated. The ideal spacing is a thin space on each side, but I find a full space totally acceptable.
Of course, worst of all is asymmetric spacing, like this— yuk.
Edit: I just realised a closed em-dash doesn't look too bad in these comments because there is a very slight space either side of it, but I still stand by the above. A closed em-dash is much worse in documents typeset in TeX, where the dash without manual spacing practically touches the letters either side of it.
While it was meticulously designed for on-screen legibility, these days higher resolution screens and anti-aliasing, etc. are a better solution than meddling with the letter shapes e.g., taller x-heights, bigger openings, etc.
One detractor did allow for Verdana when rendering fine-print/legalese at very small font sizes--as long as it was unlikely to be printed.
On most screens these days, you are probably better off, if using a font of Verdana’s vintage or older, using one optimized for print legibility.
It's best to use an open en-dash in the open case – which is standard in the UK (except for Oxford).
(This is taken from the Oxford Style Guide.)
> Some people prefer the way a ‘space-en-dash-space’ looks. Sometimes when you use the em-dash people say, “What is that? I don’t like that big long dash thing.” Some technical writers think the n-dash is the only one to use.
> It’s not a big deal. I usually use ‘space-n-dash-space’ instead of the m-dash – just to keep everyone happy. You can see this ‘wrong-n’ method used in countless websites, magazines and papers as a replacement for the m-dash. If you use the ‘wrong-n’ method and use it consistently, it works fine and seems to keep the greatest number of people happy.
http://www.punctuationmatters.com/hyphen-dash-n-dash-and-m-d...
Example with a normal space:
The quick brown fox jumps over — and, sometimes, under — the lazy dog.
Example with a thin space:
The quick brown fox jumps over — and, sometimes, under — the lazy dog.
This Smashing Magazine article discusses spaces in more detail. At the bottom of the article is a list of different spaces and their corresponding HTML entities:
I'm using the default Verdana font. Here's a screenshot of what the post looks like on my computer (Firefox on Windows).
I guess I should have added a disclaimer to say that the thin space may not always appear correctly depending on the browser/platform/setup etc. :-)
This is because hackernews has font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif and I have neither of the named fonts installed.
On my system, hackernews is rendered using Dejavu Sans. This is presumably a default for Firefox on linux which I never realised until today.
¹ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/page1
² https://www.google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac-man
EDIT: Fixed now.
I don't know enough about punctuation to know whether he actually meant "em" when he wrote "en" in several places, but I'm going to assume he actually meant to refer to em-dashes some places, and en-dashes others.
Er, yeah.
That was just ugly.
I fixed (hopefully all of) those.
I never realised up until today (I am ashamed to admit) that the convention is for no spaces. I always offset señor em-dash.
However, I think my reasoning went thus. I put a space after ‘,’ unless the comma precedes a quotation mark. I similarly would never ever not put a space after ‘.’, nor ‘;’, nor finally monsieur ‘:’. Also to contrast with the way-one-uses-hyphens.
But an unbalanced em-dash, like so– would look preposterous so left open – is how I came to use it over time. But now that it has been brought to my I find that this– is not so preposterous and in a mono font this – does appear to be swimming in space. I may have to train myself–thus–though it may take some time.
Horrible; if you are going to set a dash open and use it for the purpose of an em-dash, use an en-dash.
Setting an em-dash open is ugly as hell.
> I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens.
Two-hyphens is conventional for an en-dash. Since a set-open en-dash serves the same purposes as an em-dash, a lot of people just use that instead of the three-hyphen conventional encoding of an em-dash.
Some people use set-open hyphens on ASCII in place of dashes, which is actually probably the best thing in a monospace presentation but ugly in proportional fonts.