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Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes, because iOS/macOS translates double dashes to em dashes.

I think there may be a way to disable this, but I don’t care enough to bother.

If people want to think my posts are AI generated, oh well.

2 comments

> Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes

It depends if you put the space before and after the dashes--that, to be clear, are meant to be there--or if you don't.

What, no love for our friend the en-dash?

- vs – vs —

I once spent a day debugging some data that came from an English doc written by someone in Japan that had been pasted into a system and caused problems. Turned out to be an en-dash issue that was basically invisible to the eye. No love for en-dash!

Similar.

Compiler error while working on some ObjC. Nothing obviously wrong. Copy-pasted the line, same thing on the copy. Typed it out again, no issue with the re-typed version. Put the error version and the ok version next to each other, apparently identical.

I ended up discovering I'd accidentally lent on the option key while pressing the "-"; Monospace font, Xcode, m-dash and minus looked identical.

This issue also exists with (so called) "smart" quotes.

Which, the iOS keyboard “helpfully” uses for you.

Pretty much the first thing I turn off on a new laptop (it's in the keyboard settings on iOS too.)

Especially when you're sending some quick scratch code in a slack message.

I cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.

Technically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.

Em dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities &hairsp; and   These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...

Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks:

    : ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – —

And they usually add space to the right of these:

    “ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ < ≤ £ $ ¢ € ‹ « √ μ # @ + = ÷ - – —

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-sp...

1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space

Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.

That depends on the language — whereas German puts spaces around —, English afaik usually doesn’t.

Similarly, French puts spaces before and after ? ! while English and German only put spaces afterwards.

[EDIT: I originally wrote that French treats . , ! ? specially. In reality, french only treats ? and ! specially.]

In German you use en-dashes with spaces, whereas in English it’s em-dashes without spaces. Some people dislike em-dashes in English though and use en-dashes with spaces as well.

In English, typically em-dashes are set without spaces or with thin spaces when used to separate appositives/parentheticals (though that style isn't universal even in professional print, there are places that aet them open, and en-dashes set open can also be used in this role); when representating an interruption, they generally have no space before but frequently have space following. And other uses have other patterns.

In British English en-dashes with spaces is more common than em-dashes without spaces, I think, but I don't have any data for that, just a general impression.

> whereas in English it’s em-dashes without spaces

Didn't know! Woot, I win!

Why does AI have a preference for doing it differently?

French doesn't put one before the period.

french does "," and "." like the british and germans the rest is space befor space after

There is also the difference in using space around em-dashes.