How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

I'm just gonna say it: this does not matter. Just use whatever you want. If you're afraid that someone is going to think less of you for it: the people who matter won't.

For those who downvoted this - how does a millimeter of difference in the length of a line matter?

Well-meaning can vary if you don't put spaces around your dashes, and a well—meaning writer wants to ease the job of the reader.

ıt might simpıy not matter though, a miııimeter here and there, ı suppose.

The difference in dash length really doesn't matter and your example is not the same at all, but it probably made you feel really smart.

Did you mix those up on purpose?

An excellent example of why dash length matters. Because of the wrong usage of ‘—’ and ‘-’, it took me 10 more seconds of rereading and re-parsing your comment to understand what that first sentence meant.

I see what you did in the second paragraph too. It’s another example of “a millimeter of difference in the length of a line” mattering in that it looks weird, though it’s not much harder to read.

The undotted small "i" character comes from the modern Turkish alphabet. It's perhaps only slightly disorienting for an English reader to slightly shorten some letters that are just lines in a sans-serif font. In Turkish though, a millimeter of line can make an entirely different letter.

Being able to render a variety of line lengths with different meanings is a cool and useful thing.