So, for you professional editors/writers, will it be useful if we support these kinds of dashes/hyphens separately when we develop our software? In MS Word 2003, if you type two hyphens between words, with no spaces, they change to an m-dash (yuck) if you type one or two hyphens surrounded by spaces between word they change to an n-dash when you type the space after the second word. It seems to me that best solution is clearly an n-dash with spaces. That is certainly better than having it without the spaces, but it is really big and obtrusive. I found this site because the editor of a recent web publication of mine has changed the mere hyphen with spaces that I used in my submitted material to an m-dash with spaces.
Surely that would look even more like a join. I hardly think an n-dash without spaces would be better.
Not only is it ugly, but it seems to me that it looks as though it is joining the words rather than separating them, which is the intention. In older works (a couple of hundred years ago, you would occasionally see breaks, which were twice the width of the em-dash.Īlthough it is often seen, and may be"standard" typographical practice, I think that indicating a break in a sentence by an m-dash and no spaces between the words and the dash is just horrible. Good mathematical typographers use a different symbol yet again for this: about the width of a hyphen but thicker. Omitted from your question is the minus sign. Some publishing houses prefer to use an en-dash surrounded by a thin space in this situation. E.g, the Michelson-Morley experiment (as opposed to an experiment conducted by a single person with they hyphenated name Michelson-Morley) or Sino-Soviet pact.Īn em-dash represents a break in the sentence structure-like this. In the UK, particularly, it is used to link names which are not compounds. "en-dash." Also used to indicate that a word has been broken at the end of a line and the remainder continued on the next line.Īn en-dash is used to indicate a range, e.g., "pages 1-9". The hyphen is used to create compound words (usage in UKĪnd US differs somewhat) such as "a badly-designed car" or So I'll use the convention of - to indicate an en-dash and - for an em-dash. I see from the attempts of others to use HTML mark-up, that it doesn't work here.
0 kommentar(er)
