The same goes for curly quotes.
The different dashes have different uses and meanings, so it is appropriate that they have different glyphs. It is not nonsense.
Typography will continue to evolve over time. People seem to want more richness and complexity, not less. We've already moved beyond fixed-width fonts, even though that was all typewriters and early computers could do.
Typewriters didn't need multiple dash characters, because you can extend a hypen into an en-dash by typing hypen, backspace, half-space, hypen. You can make an em-dash with another backspace, half-space, hypen. Of course, computers lost half spaces and overstriking, for the most part.
Maaaaaaybe you need a separate minus from hypen, but that could be something you swap in, if needed (my typewriter has two keys that you can swap out, if you sent away for the keys anyway; not sure if smith-corona still stocks those)
And gained option and option+shift, which is even better (and many programs will auto-convert multiple hyphens to an en- or em-dash anyway).
How common was half spaces and overstriking anyway? I don't recall seeing it much, but it's been years since I've seen a typewritten letter.
Most people have already decided they prefer variable-width fonts (except when writing code) and multiple typefaces to setting everything in 12pt Courier. Using different dashes instead of just the keyboard hyphen-minus is the same issue.
Now we do our own typing, and increasingly, our own typesetting.
Less than 5% of what I'm doing is related to typography (namely: only when displaying text for the end user). 95% of the time when I manipulate text, the text is intended for a computer to process further. I don't want typographic issues such as the proper length of spaces when delimiting keywords on the command line, or proper collation order to slow down my `git grep`, any more than I want to be bothered by variable width fonts when I'm writing code.
UTF-8 to compose user visible strings in GUI is a godsend, though.
Text is not written only to be read visually by a human on printed paper. Arguably, text today is almost never used that way. What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously. The distinction between minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless. It is literally impossible to confuse one for the other in actual usage. Same for all the 14 technically different quotes in the English language. Literally pointless to anyone but typography geeks.
These typographic rules are vestigial. We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script and it made no sense either to make it easy for a reader to figure out which typesetting blocks the typesetter put on the machine. Both of these things are now very important.
Hyphens and em-dashes have literally opposite functions. Hyphens join words together, as in compound adjectives. Em-dashes separate clauses in a sentence. (And en-dashes are used for ranges.)
They're not extremely niche — they are common and mostly obvious.
> What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously
Yes. What is ambiguous is the hyphen-minus. It literally combines two meanings in its name.
> These typographic rules are vestigial.
They are still widely used, and still function as intended, so they are not vestigial.
> We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script
I would argue the opposite: they declined in use only because of a (temporary) limit to the number of characters available on some technologies. Thanks to Unicode the limit is removed and their use is increasing again.
It's also a meaningful differentiation to be able to communicate a sentence such as:
“’struth,” he said, “she’s 5′2″ with eyes of blue.” or, “Usually, 35–40 m.p.h. is a workable and safe speed for travel—unless pedestrians are involved, in which case adjust by −20 m.p.h.”
which are far less intelligible when set with unidirectional/same width characters.
It's also useful to have the uni-directional versions ' and " for special usages in computer science contexts, while the curly forms can be used within say a .csv without the need to be escaped.
iOS and MacOS have native means of inputting the character and on Windows I have a small utility that replaces "--=" with an en-dash and "==-" with an en-dash.
Except that spaced vs unspaced and en vs em dashes are issues of British vs US English. Differences in usage as well as appearance.
It's sold as the emoji keyboard but there's a tab for symbols that includes all the dashes. This interface also has built in clipboard history too.
Distinct hyphens and minuses are necessary both due to their different meanings and due to their different traditional appearance in any typeface that does not have fixed width.
At most the en dashes could be unified with minuses, because they normally have identical appearance, even if they have different meanings.
they seem fine to me
maybe you're just used to it, and i'm used to the other it, and mine requires fewer distinct glyphs
"'struth," he said, "she's 5'2" with eyes of blue." or, "Usually, 35-40 m.p.h. is a workable and safe speed for travel - unless pedestrians are involved, in which case adjust by -20 m.p.h."
The only one that's kind of meh is the em dash in "travel—unless", which I had to replace with " - " here. But that's kind of a display issue: there's nothing stopping anything from a font rendering "<space>-<space>" as "—", just as there's nothing stopping a font from rendering "st" as "st". That these ligatures are in Unicode is a historical mistake, and I kind of see these dashes and quotation marks as roughly similar: they should be done mostly on the rendering end, whenever possible.
Note I prefer using en dashes – like this – in a lot of my writing, which looks better to my eyes than regular dashes - like this - but having to use separate dashes for an aesthetic issue like this is kind of silly, IMHO.
What people did in hand-writing varied wildly too. I betcha that in the handwriting for lots of people the "angled" quotes look pretty straight, and things like prime marks and quotes look pretty much identical, and distinguishing between "minus sign" and "dash" is even harder.
you don't easily know where the quote ends in the more complicated cases (e.g. quotes at the end of a paragraph) if you use the same marks, especially since in typography quotes aren't repeated (though maybe they should)
Having said that, there’s definitely environments (shells and the like) where you want different behavior. Though even there it’s tricky: emoji being Unicode and a lack of random rules means that emoji “just work” everywhere. Other normalization rules might wreak havoc in certain languages people don’t know about.
ASCII only for talking to the computer is a bit of an outdated concept at this point
It's not. The mapping between ASCII and keyboard keys is clear. Wherever unambiguous English text is required (for example programming and documentation), ASCII is still the best.
Each person may want to use renderers that will do fancy things, and that's fine because it's on the render side. The issue with Unicode is that it's a messy mix of presentation and data. ASCII isn't. So whenever you create a Unicode document, you are unintentionally embedding presentation information into it, and it's not the case with ASCII.
Anyway, enough people seem to like all the extra dashes, and they don’t cause much harm, so I think it will be an uphill battle.
And who knows, maybe image recognition will free us from keyboards yet, and we can return to more sensible input paradigms, like pencils.
- The hyphen. Use it for minus and concatenation, and anywhere you need something that looks like a dash ;)
— The dash. Used to break up a sentence — mid flow no less! — and that's all. In some ways the opposite of the hyphen
And that's it, you can throw the rest away. Nobody uses them outside of fussy books, and even then the people reading them wouldn't notice their absence.
Hyphen and minus usually have a different vertical position, because hyphens should be positioned relative to the x height, whereas minus should be consistent with plus and positioned relative to the digit height.
In addition, minus signs are substantially wider than hyphens (again, like the plus sign). Minus width is often similar to en-dash width.
You want minus signs to be like the plus sign without its vertical bar, but you don’t want the plus sign and hyphen to have the same width, or same vertical position. That would just make at least one of them look awkward in context.
Sounds like you disagree, and the differences would really stick out for you?
En-dashes are used all the time (correctly) to indicate number ranges. The hyphen is too small, and just looks wrong for this use-case. e.g. 0–100 vs 0-100.
Also any modern typesetting can autoreplace what's on the keyboard, so it shouldn't stick to the bastardized version just because it's on the keyboard
That depends on fonts. In some it is represented more like minus (matching plus and center of numbers) and not like hyphen.