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

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.