Long dash character10/31/2023 Also, they are commonly slanted up with little swashes on the ends (although you see swashes on all three in Contenu at the beginning of this post). They are higher above the baseline than en or em dashes. When you place it into InDesign these converted characters often come is as Ö or something even more strange.įinally, do not think you will not be caught. Be careful of Word’s automatic conversion. You can set up the same conversion in InDesign by adding an auto-correction item. However, I have heard enough other suggestions to realize that usage varies widely.Įm dashes automatically: Word converts two hyphens to an em dash if you have auto-formatting turned on. I was taught a thin space before and after, currently I am using no additional spacing (especially in this blog where a thin space is not available. Spacing around em dashes: this is wide open to personal opinion. In fact, it is one of the sure signs of amateurism. This is an embarrassing error to professionals. Typewriters use a double hyphen for the em dash. In many ways they are very helpful-but traditionalists tend to have knee-jerk reactions to anything outside the grammar books (written decades ago). In many cases, there are no rules anymore. These changes have accelerated in recent years. Other than that, there is no standard anymore.Īmerican English is a living language in constant flux. Grammatically it is stronger than a comma but weaker than a period. The keystroke for an em-dash is Option+Shift+Hyphen (PC: Ctrl+Alt+Num–). This is the typographer’s decision to make.Įm dash: This dash is an em long. Like this: biiru (beer) keeki (cake) Sometimes, when writing in Romaji, (the English style of writing Japanese), the dash is substituted with the letter and a small line over it. It seemed to me to be easier to read and more understandable written as one–twenty-fourth with the en dash between the one and twenty-fourth. I understand, In Japanese, the long dash () means the sound is lengthened, just as Axioplase said. Last week, when talking about the width of a hair space for InDesign was one example. The keystroke for an en-dash is Option+Hyphen (PC: Ctrl+Num–).Ī special case: In rare cases, hyphens and en dashes need to be mixed for clarity. It is a typo to use a hyphen in these cases. Though on the application side you can see the difference. But if you look at the database they both look the same. Basically the reason this has happened is people copy pasting values into this column from word which converts hyphens into dashes automatically. It is used with numbers, spans, or ranges. On further investigation we found it a dash (or en dash). So, you have a couple keystrokes to learn because en and em dashes are used quite a bit during the creation of normal copy.Įn dash: This dash is an en long. ![]() In fact, hyphens are used in no other places. ![]() For example, 10-point is the normal point size for book publishers’ body copy. Hyphen: This is the character used to hyphenate words at the end of a line and to create compound words. ![]() All three have very specific usage rules. Type has three-the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. The next major change we need to discuss is dashes.
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