Wrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).
For the poster child of a naïvely set/composed text which suffers thereby see:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/vir...
That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetting unions all bargained for sinecures rather than active participation in the Desktop Publishing Revolution.
Personally, I think em-dashes (when in a font that shows the damn difference) look exaggerated and silly. They certainly don't provide any important guidance to its meaning that I can't derive from context.
That was a cool toolbox BTW :)
Yes, the Studley tool cabinet is amazing, which makes the infelicities of the book all the more enraging.
> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash.
is noticeably weird-looking. Even a spaced en-dash looks a bit small; a spaced hyphen is just odd. But if you type it like this:
> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time—proper dashes, though, not hyphens.
it becomes much more conventional and legible. If you're going to use hyphens, it's better to admit the typewriter convention and use two, like so:
> I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time -- I just use the standard keyboard hyphen, but twice.