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Are there cases where the dedicated hyphen (U+2010) is preferred over the hyphen-minus?
As far as appearance goes, almost all fonts I've looked at make U+2010 identical to U+002D (i.e., they don't put any 'minus' into the 'hyphen-minus'), but a few make U+2010 a smidgeon shorter.
It looks much better though and more visible: −1 vs -1. I wish hyphen was a separate symbol from the ascii start, or that monospace fonts didn't tend to shorten "-" cause it makes little sense in monospace anyway.
— In the context of automatic text processing, it unambiguously indicates the function of a hyphen, as opposed to a minus
— Fonts can choose to make the hyphen-minus a bit wider than a regular hyphen, to accommodate the usage as a minus sign. In that case, U+2010 would be typographically more appropriate for a hyphen, similar to how U+2212 usually is typographically more appropriate for a minus sign.
Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes.
For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which makes using the dictionary very annoying.
Which one does that? I threw up a little in my mouth and wish to avoid such style guides in the future!
It’s very common outside of America, even in English.
The first keyboard I used was my dad's typewriter, and I don't recall it having any 'dash' other that the minus sign.
(A nice thing in (La)TeX is that one could follow the "two spaces after a full-stop" rule, which then has the advantage of being an explicit marking for sentence boundaries (which your editor might be able to navigate; Emacs has a convention of assuming two spaces after a sentence-ending '.'), but then the TeX typesetting will take care of making it look right. I lost the habit of actually doing this, for better or worse, except when flycheck/checkdoc/package-linter.el makes me do it for docstrings.)
The effect of the double space is, I suspect, a product of the reader's expectations: if you expect it, its absence creates mental work, detracting from readability; if you don't expect it, its presence is what creates mental work.
You can tell when I've edited something on both a phone and a physical keyboard, based on the inconsistent use of spaces.
Hard habit to break. I learned it so long ago too.
Retraining myself to stop doing double-spaces took maybe a week.
The conversion of '--' to an en dash and '---' to an em dash is done by the TeX compiler, and appears in the rendered file, but I think that most TeX editors don't change the TeX code itself. (This is distinct from XeTeX-based compilers, which can handle non-ASCII Unicode characters like the em dash '—' directly in the source.)
(I think that the article's point is that, in some fonts, -- (two hyphens) is literally the (approximate) size of an em dash, not that it is always understood as meaning an em dash. At least in my font, --- (three hyphens) is far too long to literally look like an em dash:
---
--
—
–
(in order, three hyphens, two hyphens, em dash, en dash).)
<word> <space> <dash> <space> <word>
<word> <dash> <word>
That one I’d usually parse as a hyphen, as in e.g. well-known. “Word space dash space word” is much clearer, in my view.
> The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism
One of the things I can easily get away with by not being a US journalist :)
self-fulfilling
self—fulfilling
One of these looks very, very wrong.
Basically, we didn’t like some things in AP but we wanted to make it easy for journalists to copy/paste.
The last paragraph of the article also addressed the subjective nature of spacing around the em dash:
> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
As far as the selection detail, did you mean that you replace an em dash used like a comma or parenthesis with spaces and an en dash for specific highlight performance issues? Surely the spaces and an em dash would alleviate the selection highlight behavior and not muddy the waters of when to use an em vs. an en dash?
It's funny that they omit to mention the possibility of setting it off with a thin space ' ' or hair space ' ' (those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me), which I thought was preferred typographic practice.
(On Googling, maybe the reason that they don't mention it is that I was imagining it; I can't find any evidence for my belief.)
Interestingly, at least in my browser and grabbing the direct link to the comment with curl, show the bytes as 0x20 for both. Perhaps the comment submission handler, or even the browser, collated your more specific U+2009 (thin) and U+200A (hair) spaces into the regular U+0020 space?
Probably! I think HN strips out emoji; maybe it just takes the safest approach and strips out all non-white-listed Unicode.
(I also now looked up and found out that in Spanish, apparently, you are supposed to put space only on one side of the dash, when used as a direct speech separator.)
If you want to not have a line break, you shouldn't rely on arbitrary behavior. You should use non-breaking characters like non-breaking spaces and word joiners.
That's an interesting practicality but I don't think it's the cause of the rule: The rule probably long predates automated line breaking. Also, I think automatic line breaking will break compound words at the hyphen; it doesn't require spaces (which is also obvious from a software development point of view: the logic is relatively simple either way):
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing double-
decker lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur ...Why yes, I did list the opposite behavior as an advantage of each. Because that, too, is up to individual preference. :-)
I've definitely noticed the behavior you describe on some layout engines, too, and it's another reason why I personally prefer "foo – bar" style.
I've come to the conclusion it boils down to which style manual one follows. I've taken a careful look at numbers of high-end books which no doubt have been carefully typeset and I've found EM dashes with and without spaces.
It seems there is no definitive rule but I might be wrong.
For what it's worth, I was in the last class in my high school to learn typing on IBM Selectric typewriters. We were taught to type two spaces, two hyphens, then two spaces. Incidentally, we were taught two spaces after periods and colons. To this day, I find it hard to read text that doesn't have proper spacing after periods. (HTML and WYSIWYG word processors handle formatting, but e.g. fixed-font text editors don't)
The old typewriter typefaces were monospaced, ie. every character was the same width, but this is no longer the case. Virtually all typefaces today are proportionally spaced, not monospaced. So it’s redundant to leave extra room after periods.
My comment applies to a few pedantics I know personally, who stubbornly double space after periods when typing in regular situations.
That’s one thing I really like about English: There’s no central authority decreeing what’s right and what’s wrong top down, and it feels like there is some room for individual preferences and experimentation.
Very refreshing, compared to e.g. German, which has more than one semi-official authority gate keeping “correctness” in speech and writing.
If you practice your skills, you will reap the rewards.
It's a hard one to answer: We could look at published Emily Dickinson books from the time, but did Dickinson really pay that close attention to or have that much control over the type?
We could look at Dickinson's actual personal documents, but if they were handewritten, distinguishing dashes could be difficult even if there was intention there.
I interpret her marks—
as breathless pauses—
that— having no unicode—
should be given to m—
and space—
This list of authors punctuation quirks is interesting though.
https://lithub.com/the-punctuation-marks-loved-and-hated-by-...
But, no, now it's a problem because the majority of people's experience with writing is graded essays. And because LLMs emulate professionals, it's now a red flag if students write too much like professionals. What a joke.
One may have a bunch of key ranges each associated with a value or one may have a key that should be "rounded" to the nearest key or retreave the one below or above it.
It feels like something basic enough to have in a language and I found it oddly complicated to write myself. Comparing it with all values doesn't seem like a very good solution.
Not that I know many languages.
However this is the kind of rule that "existed" for a while and most likely will go away as most people can't be bothered with the difference and it all looks similar anyway
Or maybe who knows, it will keep going on because chatgpt knows it
To me, it feels like it is the same purpose as the EM dashes.
And I discovered the EM with ChatGPT, I've never seen it before.
They're frequently used in skilled and professional grade writing.
Semicolons must have independent clauses—phrases that could form a full sentence on their own—on both sides of them; they are essentially alternatives for periods. Em dashes don't require independent clauses on either side.
In the italicized sentence,
* phrases that could form a full sentence on their own is not an independent clause, but valid between em dashes (which function like commas or parentheses here).
* The parts before and after the semicolon are independent clauses. You could replace the semicolon with a period and you'd have perfectly valid grammar. I just chose to connect the two sentences a bit more.
I don't know if you can use em dashes as the parent comment describes, connecting three independent clauses:
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet—I eat them all summer.
I think the above is wrong; it should be one of the following:
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet—and I eat them all summer.: The last section is a dependent clause made by "and", not an independent clause.
* My favorite fruit is peaches—they are very sweet; I eat them all summer.
Maybe there are examples I'm not thinking of? I infer that the rule might be that the punctution following the em-dashed clauses should be the punctuation that would have been used without the em-dashed clause, but that's based on very limited evidence.
https://thenarrativearc.org/blog/2020/2/4/epic-grammar-battl...
Semicolons are generally alternatives to periods, when you want more connection between the two sentences. Like periods, semicolons must have two full sentences—that is, what could be full sentences—on either side of them; the potential 'full sentences' are properly called independent clauses. (A dependent clause needs the rest of the sentence to form valid grammar; it can't function on its own. For example, in this paragraph's first sentence, when you want more connection between the two sentences is a dependent clause. Often they follow commas.)
Another use of semicolons is for lists in a paragraph where one of the list items has a comma in it (similar to the parsing problem for CSVs where some records contain commas): I only like wine; beer, but only ales; and orange juice.
Which can be fun when parsing CSV files from various sources. I've hit numbers with U2010 or others where you would expect a hyphen-minus should be. Presumably someone² has copied a negative number from a document where one of the alternate symbols was used, and pasted it into everyone's favourite data-mangler¹ which interpreted it as a string, and so on down the chain.
--------
[1] Excel. Sometimes a joy, sometimes the bane of my existence.
[2] It is surprising, horrifying even, how much manual manipulation of data goes on in banking, where you might naturally assume everything is more automated these days. Sometimes a laborious manual process done regularly is seen as cheaper than paying for it to be automated…
Re last paragraph: dashes, etc. are confusing for perhaps most of us who aren't, say, typesetters, myself included. I use EM dashes a lot usually without a space between words and sometimes with spaces when I think the typography calls for it—or for extra emphasis.
Essentially, most of us guess the rules and often this doesn't matter much but it can in certain circumstances.
For example, in say machine conversion/transliteration. The ASCII dash is often used as a substitute for Unicode minus sign because it's easy to select [it's my usual practice], and anyway many don't know there is an actual difference. Whilst a human will usually know the difference by its use or context a machine may take the literal interpretation which could lead to say a numerical calculation error.
This problem has annoyed me for a long while. Why is it that wordprocessors and editors do not highlight these characters and query whether the usage is correct? Surely this ought not to be that difficult.
Another example is Roman numerals. The average person will enter say an uppercase 'I' for the Roman numeral one. Here's a typical example which is incorrect:
WWII
Here I entered the normal ASCII 'I' because it was too involved to find the correct Unicode character for Roman numeral one.
I'd like to know what others who are in typography, machine learning etc. think about this, and why WP programs and editors don't have simple ergonomics that allow for easy selection of the correct character.
† On a related matter, you'll note I've used single quotes whereas mmooss uses double quotes. This tell me that mmooss is likely in the US whereas I'm not. Again, this is not really a major problem for humans but it can be in transliteration, etc. Also, it's unclear (at least to me) what the default is for quoting quotes, i.e.: "" versus "' (right, I've refrained from using triple quotes).
Again, this seems country specific with I believe the US favoring double followed by single. Even when these rules are defined do people strictly adhere to them?
* Hyphens connect things, such as compound words: double-decker, cut-and-dried, 212-555-5555.
* EN dashes make a range between things: Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years: both connect not only the endpoints, but define that all the space between is included. (Compare the last usage with the phone number example under Hyphens.)
* EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts: 'What the—!'; A paragraph should express one idea—but rules are made to be broken.
Unicode has the original ASCII hyphen-minus (U+002d), as well as a dedicated hyphen (U+2010), other functional hyphens such as soft and non-breaking hyphens, and a dedicated minus sign (U+2212), and some variations of minus such as subscript, superscript, etc.
There's also the figure dash "‒" (U+2012), essentally a hyphen-minus that's the same width as numbers and used aesthetically for typsetting, afaik. And don't overlook two-em-dashes "⸺" and three-em-dashes "⸻" and horizontal bars "―", the latter used like quotation marks!