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Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

Aesthetics argues against that, as well as tradition. (and you failed to note the use of primes and double primes)

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.

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To be honest this seems alright (or rather, no more awkward than the original):

"'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.

To offer a different perspective, the parent's version looks better (i.e. readable) and more pleasing to me.

> "she's 5'2" with eyes of blue."

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)

Yeah, it was late, and I failed to make the latter portion of that an internal/quoted quote which would have made my point more clear.

There should have been a base simple version, and variations of it to keep the keyboard functional. The variations would need to be specifically called out to be used over the simple case. The way it looks now is like a bucket with so many dupes it becomes a mess.

I really appreciate the use of proper em-dashes aesthetically— I use them for parentheticals, interruptions, and to join related thoughts.

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.

Same. Once you learn the appropriate uses for each and how to input them, it becomes easy to just use the correct dash.

> Just use the correct 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.

Sure. Use whatever is standard for your variety of English. Either is better than just using hyphen-minus everywhere.

On Windows, I use http://wincompose.info/ for all my special-character needs (and use the system compose key on Linux).

You can just use Windows Key + . in newer Windows

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.

While I the other typography looks great, in safari on iOS your “minus twenty” doesn’t actually look better than plain old -20, to me.

While I agree with most of what you've said, I'm not sure I see a use-case for the distinction between Hyphen, Minus and Hyphen-Minus. Specifically, with having all three. If I were designing Unicode, I'd remove the Minus sign specifically. That way, if you absolutely need to e.g. use an old font that used long minuses (in old texts they could be even an em-dash), it would still be _encoded_ as the parseable expected by every software to date

I would remove Hyphen-Minus, whose only reason for existence was that the mechanical typewriters saved a key by using the same character for both purposes.

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.

The minus symbol aligns with the + symbol and numbers, en- and em-dashes align with text (and there should be different forms for use with lowercase, and all caps settings).

> which are far less intelligible

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

Personally I find the "adjust by −20 m.p.h." a little odd looking.

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