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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash.

Horrible; if you are going to set a dash open and use it for the purpose of an em-dash, use an en-dash.

Setting an em-dash open is ugly as hell.

> I prefer to ASCII-encode my em dashes with three hyphens.

Two-hyphens is conventional for an en-dash. Since a set-open en-dash serves the same purposes as an em-dash, a lot of people just use that instead of the three-hyphen conventional encoding of an em-dash.

Some people use set-open hyphens on ASCII in place of dashes, which is actually probably the best thing in a monospace presentation but ugly in proportional fonts.

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>> I land on the side favoring a space on each side of the dash.

> Horrible;

I strongly disagree. A closed em-dash—like this—looks jarringly like the words either side of it are closely related, as if by an extra-long hyphen. For example, in t previous sentence, “this—looks” visually appears to me to be a single compound entity, which is ironic considering that the intention was to make them appear especially separated. The ideal spacing is a thin space on each side, but I find a full space totally acceptable.

Of course, worst of all is asymmetric spacing, like this— yuk.

Edit: I just realised a closed em-dash doesn't look too bad in these comments because there is a very slight space either side of it, but I still stand by the above. A closed em-dash is much worse in documents typeset in TeX, where the dash without manual spacing practically touches the letters either side of it.

Hackernews defaults to Verdana—a known terrible font-design. Dashes should be visibly thinner than hyphens. And the reply-box is in monospace, so I can't see difference between the en- and the em-dash. In German we use the en-dash with leading and trailing space instead of the em-dash.

If anyone else was surprised as I was to hear that Verdana was disliked, here's the most compelling argument I found against it:

While it was meticulously designed for on-screen legibility, these days higher resolution screens and anti-aliasing, etc. are a better solution than meddling with the letter shapes e.g., taller x-heights, bigger openings, etc.

One detractor did allow for Verdana when rendering fine-print/legalese at very small font sizes--as long as it was unlikely to be printed.

Verdana was exquisitely well designed for the special problem of on-screen readability on the kind of screens that dominated in the mid-1990s, but, yeah, it's not 1996 any more.

On most screens these days, you are probably better off, if using a font of Verdana’s vintage or older, using one optimized for print legibility.

An open em-dash is used to indicate the omission of a word.

It's best to use an open en-dash in the open case – which is standard in the UK (except for Oxford).

(This is taken from the Oxford Style Guide.)

AFAIK closed em-dashes are the more widespreadly used version, and the fact that they are em-dashes gives away that they indicate no relations among the words they separate. Though this is kind of a bikeshedding problem where people don't differentiate between a hyphen and anything else, and sentences result incomprehensible, or they trip you and you have to read and re-read them. Even many publishers just don't care. I'm actually content when people are kind enough to use something that's not a hyphen for indicating what em-dash does. IDK whan en-dash is really used for, but apart from word pairs (like in love--hate) I'd rather not see them. My conception of dashes for daily use: hyphen for compound words or minus sign (too much trouble to distinguish), en-dash for word pairs, em-dash for marking asides in sentences (where they denote kind-of a different tone from paranthesised passages).

The en-dash with spaces instead of em-dash without spaces is the predominant convention in French texts.

Today (as per this thread) I learned I've been mistaking en-dashes for em-dashes all along. With surrounding spaces, at that. Em-dashes feel too long and it feels unnatural not having spaces in between words – there's always at least one, when using any other punctuation marks.

> Some people prefer the way a ‘space-en-dash-space’ looks. Sometimes when you use the em-dash people say, “What is that? I don’t like that big long dash thing.” Some technical writers think the n-dash is the only one to use.

> It’s not a big deal. I usually use ‘space-n-dash-space’ instead of the m-dash – just to keep everyone happy. You can see this ‘wrong-n’ method used in countless websites, magazines and papers as a replacement for the m-dash. If you use the ‘wrong-n’ method and use it consistently, it works fine and seems to keep the greatest number of people happy.

http://www.punctuationmatters.com/hyphen-dash-n-dash-and-m-d...

I find space-less em dashes hard on the eyes. The extra whitespace around the em dash helps denote the "aside-ness" of the remark.

Many people do. Use en-dash with whitespace.

You can put a thin space before and after the em dash. This space is narrower than a normal letter space.

Example with a normal space:

The quick brown fox jumps over — and, sometimes, under — the lazy dog.

Example with a thin space:

The quick brown fox jumps over — and, sometimes, under — the lazy dog.

This Smashing Magazine article discusses spaces in more detail. At the bottom of the article is a list of different spaces and their corresponding HTML entities:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/10/space-yourself/

What font do you use to read hackernews? Because in Verdana those are exactly the same. Tried some other fonts in inspector but think your thin spaces could be even thinner :)

Not the commenter you're replying to, but on my system I see a difference between the two examples they post.

This is because hackernews has font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif and I have neither of the named fonts installed.

On my system, hackernews is rendered using Dejavu Sans. This is presumably a default for Firefox on linux which I never realised until today.

What font do you use to read hackernews?

I'm using the default Verdana font. Here's a screenshot of what the post looks like on my computer (Firefox on Windows).

https://imgur.com/a/QqmeC

I guess I should have added a disclaimer to say that the thin space may not always appear correctly depending on the browser/platform/setup etc. :-)

Incidentally the author of that article, Marcin Wichary, (a) has many awesome photos of historical computing and typography, among other things, almost all CC-licensed¹, and (b) co-wrote the Pac-Man Google doodle².

¹ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/page1

² https://www.google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac-man

I agree with you but I think you have mistyped "em" as "en" is several places.

EDIT: Fixed now.

See what happens when people use en dashes when they mean to use em dashes? Total chaos!

There's such a thing as an en-dash too: http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html

I don't know enough about punctuation to know whether he actually meant "em" when he wrote "en" in several places, but I'm going to assume he actually meant to refer to em-dashes some places, and en-dashes others.

"you misspelled ..." is often a way to be funny. I suspect colanderman was making a point about em dashes being mo' better than en dashes.

No, the GP literally mistyped (or had autocorrected) "em" as "en" in a couple locations. Fixed now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16089209).

> I agree with you but I think you have mistyped "em" as "en" is several places.

Er, yeah.

That was just ugly.

I fixed (hopefully all of) those.

I noticed few others seemed to favor it as much, but never wondered why. My friend hates the em dash, and I suppose I partly agree. She said she dislikes when people use it as commas – but parenthesis are fine – which is pretty fair.

> Horrible;[…]

I never realised up until today (I am ashamed to admit) that the convention is for no spaces. I always offset señor em-dash.

However, I think my reasoning went thus. I put a space after ‘,’ unless the comma precedes a quotation mark. I similarly would never ever not put a space after ‘.’, nor ‘;’, nor finally monsieur ‘:’. Also to contrast with the way-one-uses-hyphens.

But an unbalanced em-dash, like so– would look preposterous so left open – is how I came to use it over time. But now that it has been brought to my I find that this– is not so preposterous and in a mono font this – does appear to be swimming in space. I may have to train myself–thus–though it may take some time.

If you prefer spaces around the dash, then use an en-dash. This is standard outside the US, though not universally. Most US publishers use the closed em-dash.

Are en dashes not meant to be used to show a range, especially between numbers? Not that it matters.

en-dashes set closed (without spaces) are used for ranges, set open they are used the same way as em-dashes.

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