M-, n- and other dashes

[jack]

I was under the impression that there were uses for mid-height horizontal lines in text:

1. Hyphenating words or joining words together.
2. (Binary or unary) Minus sign.
3. Separating sentences, eg. "I was -- as you may know -- pedantic."
4. Indicating ranges, eg. "A temperature of 20-25 celcius"
5. Joining things that already have hyphens in.
6. Joining things not to modify one by the other, eg. "US-UK tensions"
7. Introducing quotes or attributions

I *thought* that 1 was a hyphen, 2 was a minus sign, 3 was an em-dash, 4,5 and 6 were en-dashes, and 7 was a specially long dash that was generally treated the same as an em-dash.

And I *though* that typographically you would ideally have a dash narrower than a letter called a hyphen used as a hyphen, a dash as wide as an 'n' used for an en-dash, a dash as wide as an 'm' used for an em-dash, and a dash of unknown width used as a minus sign. But that normally (if you don't have unicode or don't think it's an important distinction) you use a single dash to represent hyphen and minus (generally the one generated by a standard keyboard), and often as an 'n' dash as well, and often two together as an em-dash. (And that em-dashes may or may not have spaces round, and the others shouldn't.)

However, people in the pub who edit things said I was misled somewhere along the line. I've certainly only picked this up (Bill Walsh and wikipedia feature heavily). I know it's not important, but does anyone want to update me?

Comments

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Well, TeX seems to share your impressions...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh. Good :)

[tienelle.livejournal.com]

American standard style for (3) seems to be to use an em-dash and no spaces: I was—as you may know—pedantic. British style is to use an en-dash and spaces: I was – as you may know – pedantic. A minus sign is not a dash; it's its own symbol which I think is about as wide as an en-dash in most typefaces. Joining things which already have hyphens is just a losing proposition.

An em is a useful unit of length: it's the point size of the current typeface. In most typefaces not designed by monkeys, this is about the width of the character M. An em-dash is one em long. An en-dash is half as long as an em-dash, which, subject to earlier simian considerations, is about the width of an N.

All of this has no more authority than my own observation and some of the LaTeX documentation.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

All of this has no more authority than my own observation and some of the LaTeX documentation.

LOL. Thank you.

British style is to use an en-dash and spaces

Do you know if that is the case? I had supposed that was just people in a hurry. But I wouldn't know.

A minus sign is not a dash

Sorry, I tried to avoid that terminology, but slipped up. I meant "a dash-shaped object" and included it because it's often used as a use of '-', not to imply it's linguistically a dash :)

Joining things which already have hyphens is just a losing proposition.

Oh, no, it's great fun! "The financial audit revealed for Off–balance-sheet activities" -- for fun and profit can be reworded by permuting the dashes to imply, eg. off-balance sheet-activities :)

[tienelle.livejournal.com]

I think I picked up the "British style is to use an en-dash and spaces" from some LaTeX documentation. Certainly I haven't noticed em-dashes in books which aren't from America, and I definitely notice them in those books as something odd.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

3. Separating sentences, eg. "I was -- as you may know -- pedantic."

Are you sure those are sentences?

Are you sure those are sentences?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think I meant, separating individual sentences into parts, eg. the sentence "I was, as you may know, pedantic," as opposed to separating several sentences from each other, as you're right, that would be wrong.