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

Today in “typesetting before we had typewriters”: …

At least we have dedicated O/0, and l/1 keys now. But we still see a lot of "straight" quotes instead of “those smart quotes Microsoft Word likes to generate”. And dashes. Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character? This is often set with slightly more space between dots than ..., and it by definition never wraps across a line between those dots. You still see (C) instead of ©.

It is one of those things that doesn’t really matter for readability, but although they can’t necessarily put a finger on why, people may still notice that some documents or pages appear to be set with more care for details than others.

(edit: I guess if you don’t have to search on Google what the hell a ‘Microsoft Word’ is, then you’re officially old)

> dedicated O/0, and l/1 keys now

And the 1 and 8 aren't next to each other anymore, either. (See typewriters from the "18"00s.)

> those smart quotes

Fixing straight quotes is a hard problem[0]. My FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], includes my library, KeenQuotes[2], for replacing them at build time. It's not perfect, but can typeset my ~400 page novel without any errors.

> Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character?

Yes! Here's where it gets parsed:

https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...

Then emitted:

https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...

Then transformed into an HTML entity:

https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/-/blob/main/src/mai...

When typesetting Markdown, KeenWrite first converts the document to XHTML (i.e., XML), then invokes ConTeXt to convert XML into TeX macros. One of those macros handles the ellipses by converting it to \dots{}:

https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/-/blob/main/x...

This renders as the Unicode character in the final document: …

> set with more care for details

Some of us old folks care about these details. ;-)

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73466438/59087

[1]: https://keenwrite.com/

[2]: https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes

People have approximated ellipsis by using `. . .`.

I use ellipsis. Which ironically is way too short when viewed in monotype…

for em dashes and ellipsis at least it's trivial to convert before displaying them... which I do in my own markdown-to-publication toolchain (but not here on HN).

I use ellipses & dashes… perhaps the former will convince people I am human.

I hate smart quotes because it's super weird to use the «French» and „German“ quotation marks.

What's so weird about it? It's the appropriate way to do it when writing in those languages.

And really easy to do on an Android phone, I've found: Switch the input to French or German, and the on-screen keyboard offers the appropriate quote marks for that language in the same place as usual.