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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism at least, says

  <word> <space> <dash> <space> <word>

Outside of journalism, usually there is no padding, only,

  <word> <dash> <word>

I'm with you: For searches, the spaces make the words easier to parse. Those rules predate computers, I would guess.

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> <word> <dash> <word>

That one I’d usually parse as a hyphen, as in e.g. well-known. “Word space dash space word” is much clearer, in my view.

> The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism

One of the things I can easily get away with by not being a US journalist :)

It’s quite hard to mistake an em dash for a hyphen in a proportional font.

self-fulfilling

self—fulfilling

One of these looks very, very wrong.

I agree, although I still prefer spaces between —.

Chicago Manual of Style has no spaces, so there’s some variation at least.

CMOS is not journalism, so it's not variation from the GP?

A wider number of people use either of them. Every place I’ve used used CMOS which I now use with others.

Company I used to work for used AP for things like press releases and, I think, official blog posts and Chicago plus a couple different tech style guides for everything else.

Basically, we didn’t like some things in AP but we wanted to make it easy for journalists to copy/paste.

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