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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

>> 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.

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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.

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).

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.)

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

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