That said, I don't use en dashes, if I want my numbers to line up I use a fixed-width font.
Use ;
Works just fine
Comma, not semicolon, is the usual alternative to em-dashes for setting off asides, semicolons set off independent clauses.
This character ‘—‘ looks like one long dash to me, even though I typed the dash button twice. What’s even crazier is if I type four dashes ‘——‘ it still looks like one even longer dash; even six ‘———‘ is a solid line, and I can delete it by pressing the backspace button once
I have no idea how to get my phone to display two short dashes side by side: ‘--‘ maybe I can fake it by puttin an emoji in between, knowing that hackernews will filter it out. Let’s see what happens.
Edit - ooh that totally works. I’d never really paid attention to how this feature worked before.
“--” can also be input on iOS by entering “- -” and then deleting the space. Or you can disable the “Smart punctuation” setting and type what you actually mean.
You started by talking about kerning fonts, which is a great analogy.
Building on that - kerning is awesome because stuff looks better and I don't need to do anything for it to happen. Would it work to have my display system figure out which type of dash to use automatically?
Like, a dash inside a word should be short (under the assumption that you're linking the words together) and dashes with whitespace around it should be longer (under the assumption that you're switching context/injecting an idea into a sentence).
I also use capitalization and punctuation when I type while many people do not. It'd be great if they did, since it makes reading easier and takes almost no additional effort, but I'm not going to let it ruin my day. The parent comment is about why the distinction in dashes matters and has virtually nothing to do with typography enthusiasm, but rather reader comprehension. If you don't want to integrate that information into your life, great, but that's not really a refutation. For my part, I found it interesting. Even though I use em-dashes I learned more about how they're helpful. If you don't want to use them, I'm almost positive no one is ever going to correct you.
I don't and; but dumb tools replace -- with em-dash which breaks shit.
> If you don't want to use them, I'm almost positive no one is ever going to correct you.
Still have to look at it and suffer consequences of dumb editors replacing -- with em-dashes when someone innocently tries to just say commandline parameter
These are typesetters concerns, not writers concerns. They are all context sensitive tweaks to what amounts to the same glyph.
If the rules for each have as well defined contexts as the article suggests, then it sounds like something more suited to ligatures and kerning.
Full glyph replacement ligatures were not something initially supported by all font formats, so perhaps the fact that they continuing to exist as separate characters is more of a historical detail. It's something that could easily be added with new fonts though.
My favorite is that it will render 1920x1080, for example, as 1920×1080. I think the former looks terrible and unprofessional, especially when I see it in actual products rather than prose. So I really hope this catches on.
From a software "separating of concerns" viewpoint it feels wrong to me to have your font renderer infer meaning. A pre-processor that replaces hyphens with the correct dash – like Word does – feels more sane to me.
Anyone can use a hyphen for all three purposes right now and people would understand the meaning, because the meaning is primarily derived from the context of surrounding glyphs. Only typesetters would complain that a subtly more appropriate glyph should be used for the purposes of refined optics and geometry etc.
Therefore an endash and emdash ligature could only change the meaning IF the context of each use case overlap. i.e if there is a valid glyph based context in which endash and emdash are both valid... which I don't think there is because that would be far too subtle.
It may not be entirely irrelevant, but it’s very close to it. A bit like saying your tie has to be knotted a specific way to look respectable. Very fun for the in-group, but completely incomprehensible to those outside.
Like, I’m not opposed to having a few silly things to learn just to separate those that can be bothered to pay attention from those that do not, but I’d be hard pressed to say it’s actually relevant outside of that.
That is an extremely low bar. People lived their entire lives without X for any X.
By the same logic you might as well say: "why are we even kerning fonts, who cares if there's a few gaps when i write »irl«."
The fact that using different dashes does encode meaning in a subtle sense does have relevance for semantics -- but that's, imho, almost secondary to this argument, as it's not as grammatically relevant as commas and. periods, for example.
The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-typographic balance:
- A longer dash to link words that belong together is visually perceived as an interruption and doesn't feel like those two words are one
- In reverse, a shorter dash when switching context -- or interjecting another idea within a sentence -- doesn't slow the pace of the text flow enough, and your brain will read/intonate it the same way as when linking words.
- And at last, either of them won't preserve optical balance when displaying a numerical range, as numbers are wider than a hyphen, but narrower than an em space, which would result in either insufficient visual separation compared to spaces following said numbers, or too much of an optical gap within an entity that belongs together.
That's the barebones set of dashes that are relevant for a balanced typographical appearance, not made up pedantic complexity to annoy people. Otherwise we'd be taking about half and quarter em dashes and the likes.