[HN Gopher] How to Use Em Dashes (-), En Dashes (-), and Hyphens...
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How to Use Em Dashes (-), En Dashes (-), and Hyphens (-)
Author : Stratoscope
Score : 146 points
Date : 2025-03-27 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.merriam-webster.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.merriam-webster.com)
| perihelions wrote:
| Dupe--https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43447819 ( _" How to
| use an en-dash and em-dash correctly?"_, 43 comments)
| jimnotgym wrote:
| More interestingly it is the same highly niche subject from two
| different websites in two days. HN is...different
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than
| hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two
| hyphens, like: --
|
| Absolutely _proper and correct_ use of em dashes, en dashes, and
| hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In
| fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in
| general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon
| pre-2022.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Alt+hyphen or alt+shift+hyphen is an endash/emdash. You may not
| have been aware of it because it's so subtle, but many people
| (including myself) used emdashes long before 2022
|
| (edit: apparently only on Mac, see reply below)
| jml7c5 wrote:
| I believe that's only on MacOS.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Seems like you're correct. Interesting!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I think Microsoft Office (maybe jiat Word, but definitely
| not Windows) has a similar default shortcut.
| harrall wrote:
| You don't need a shortcut on Word.
|
| You just type two hyphens (--) and Word will convert it
| to an em dash.
| thesauri wrote:
| On Macs:
|
| Hyphen -: -
|
| En Dash -: alt -
|
| Em Dash --: alt shift -
| alabastervlog wrote:
| The default US English Mac keyboard is so extremely good, and
| has been the way it is for so long, that I remain baffled
| that other platforms haven't simply copied it. I came to it
| relatively late in life and it's one of the reasons I wish
| I'd started using Macs sooner.
| agys wrote:
| This specific key combination is not US keyboard specific.
| I like how they managed to group characters that are
| formally similar by binding them to the same keys.
|
| Examples:
|
| en and em are on -
|
| Below are maybe Swiss specific?
|
| ~ is on N
|
| @ is on G
|
| | and \ and / are on 7
|
| [?] is on V
|
| Y= is on Y and EUR is on E
|
| [?] on W ( [?] is a rotated W :)
|
| etc.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Yeah, mostly the same on my US keyboard, except a couple
| like "@" (that's shift-2 on basically all US keyboards,
| and is printed on the key) and |/\, which are more
| prominent on US keyboards (two simply have their own
| keys, no shift modifier, even). I get the (c) symbol for
| option+g (which still kind-of makes sense!)
|
| I appreciate that the designer of the layout clearly
| attempted to make some kind of mnemonic connection to the
| degree they could. Makes it easier to discover and
| remember the key-combos, even without a cheat sheet.
| agys wrote:
| Ah! (c) is on C (makes sense!)
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| my favorite example of this is ellipsis ... opt-; (the
| key with the colon over the semicolon is sort of a
| rotated ellipsis)
|
| thank you for teaching me [?]
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Except for international where EUR is opt-shift-2 (next
| to the pound/hash), next the to dollar
|
| modifiers:
|
| opt-e+letter e (acute/aigu)
|
| opt-`+letter e (grave)
|
| opt-i+letter u (circumflex)
|
| opt-u+letter u (umlaut)
|
| opt-n+letter n (for the manana)
| culi wrote:
| It's pretty decent but the fact that I can't type an
| arbitrary unicode character has been a huge annoyance of
| mine since I switched from Windows/WSL to Mac.
|
| They have shortcuts for I, I, and I but not for many
| commonly used characters like arrows
| minitech wrote:
| Control+Command+Space or Fn+E or Edit > Emoji & Symbols
| if you know the character's name. It's not very
| convenient for repeated use, but it gets the job done in
| a pinch.
| wil421 wrote:
| The engineers of various AIs are probably reading your comment
| and making adjustments.
|
| Or we are both just AIs, as a portion of HN comments are,
| commenting back and forth about other AIs.
| nextts wrote:
| As are super pedantic humans.
| salynchnew wrote:
| Most obvious tell of the former/current Stripe employee, imho.
| jsheard wrote:
| What's the significance of Stripe here?
| dadoum wrote:
| I use a compose key on Linux to write those. By default you
| should have these compositions available: --- - -- || --. - -
| akshayshah wrote:
| Em- and en-dashes have been well-supported by LaTeX, the
| smartypants family of Markdown extensions, and plain HTML for
| more than 20 years.
|
| In your support, though, calling the extension "smartypants"
| really hints at the target audience :)
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| On mac it's very easy to get an em-dash, just alt+shift+`-`.
| Though I do concur that it's more likely to come from an LLM, I
| don't think it should be considered a tell -- I find it more of
| a predictor of the writer's age.
| grumbel wrote:
| In Linux/Xorg with a compose/multi-key one can do:
|
| <Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <period> : "-" U2013 # EN DASH
|
| <Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "--" U2014 # EM DASH
|
| More in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
| dml2135 wrote:
| I used to intern for a literary magazine and I can confirm that
| half my copy-editing was enforcing proper use of em-dashes.
| This was well before 2022.
| mkehrt wrote:
| I always use an em dash when possible when I should, and double
| en dash when I can't, just because I'm that kind of nerd. But
| it is the case that a double en dash on iOS autocorrects to an
| em dash, so I'm suspicious of the claim that em dashes are a
| tell for LLM writing.
| nextts wrote:
| Most editors should auto changes a double dash into em dash.
| I thing Google Docs does for example.
| BalinKing wrote:
| This test feels biased by the fact that, like others have said,
| macOS provides keyboard shortcuts. For example, I'm only Gen Z
| and yet have tried for many years to use the proper dash
| characters in the right places, which is made much easier by
| virtue of being on a Mac.
|
| Of course, I guess it's entirely possible--even accounting for
| OS--that this test remains statistically useful. It makes me
| kinda sad that my (very much human-generated) writing fails the
| Turing test....
| MrJohz wrote:
| The compose key, for those who use it, also makes it very
| easy to do em/en dashes, and I use them quite regularly as a
| result.
| harrall wrote:
| On iPhone, type two hyphens to make an em dash:
|
| -- into --
|
| If OP wrote their post on an iPhone, they would have
| inadvertently appeared as an LLM by their own test.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Does that become an en dash if it's between two numbers?
| Freak_NL wrote:
| That has nothing to do with being on a Mac. Em-dashes and the
| compose-key work fine on Linux, and Android has them under
| the '-' of the on-screen keyboard when long-pressed.
|
| (Windows probably has some way, but those are rarely
| discoverable.)
| BalinKing wrote:
| That's true, I do use them a lot on iOS as well--similarly,
| it's a long-press on '-' to get an en or em dash.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| It's — in HTML or Markdown.
|
| If you use eg. a Japanese IME, you can also get it by typing a
| normal hyphen and selecting the em dash from the picker.
| layman51 wrote:
| That's interesting to note. I have usually taken the time to
| properly use en-dashes when it seems appropriate because I
| frequently deal with strings that represent academic years. At
| least where I live, these span two calendar years. I have
| noticed that a lot of college websites tend to use the en-dash
| properly (e.g. on their academic calendar webpages).
| kbenson wrote:
| Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In
| fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on
| my terminal locale settings and man (well, troff/groff most
| likely) was converting hyphens in param definitions to some
| sort of dash character, meaning I couldn't copy and paste out
| of the man page. I think it also affected perldoc for the same
| reason.
|
| I don't doubt there are publishing platforms that do it
| automatically as well, so I wouldn't count on seeing them as an
| indicator of generated output, even if it may be _processed_ in
| some manner.
| tedunangst wrote:
| This is because the original was written using the wrong
| markup. When the output was ascii, nobody noticed, but it
| matters when the output is unicode.
| o11c wrote:
| That's revisionism. It was considered correct historically,
| before someone decided to unilaterally declare all existing
| man pages "wrong".
| globular-toast wrote:
| (La)TeX would typeset -- as an en dash. --- gets you an em
| dash.
|
| I, of course, used proper dashes in typeset documents, at least
| after I'd learnt about them in Knuth's _The TeXbook_. I have
| found myself occasionally use them in ASCII contexts just as
| ---. But I 've never sought out the proper unicode character.
| maegul wrote:
| Certain corners of the world have absolutely cared about and
| employed the proper use of all the "dashes" well before but all
| the way up to 2022. I'd imagine LLMs have just consumed some of
| that material.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Pretty much everything professionally edit and typeset does,
| and those will generally be retained in Unicode text
| (obviously, not if it gets converted to ASCII). It's less
| common in internet fora because not all users either know the
| use of dashes or have easy access to them on the devices they
| are using, and if its not both familiar and easy, people are
| going to skip it in quick messages.
| tomrod wrote:
| I wrote for a magazine during college days a few decades ago
| that uses the Chicago manual of style. I still use em dashes,
| en dashes, and hyphens regularly. They don't show up as such in
| markdown, but they are effectively: one dash for hyphen, two
| for em-dash, and one with spaces surrounding it for en dash.
| kingo55 wrote:
| More sophisticated clients require we use dashes correctly. I
| first encountered it pre-pandemic, so in professional contexts
| it's not a sure-fire signal of LLM use -- Should you see em
| dashes correctly used in the Hacker News comments or Reddit,
| for that matter, then it's pretty reliable tell... Usually. ;)
| necovek wrote:
| As I mentioned above, I've had them easily accessible with a
| keyboard layout for >20 years on all the systems I've used --
| the only caveat that I find it really ugly with no spaces
| around em-dashes, which is usually recommended for English.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I've been Googling "em dash" and copypasting from the Google
| results for a solid 15 years now. Long before LLMs.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Just use the Raycast emojipicker, it's very good. Better and
| faster than the macOS one
| necovek wrote:
| While this is true, this is an amazingly silly omission.
|
| Serbian and Croatian XKB keyboard layouts have had em- and en-
| dashes since early 2000s even if they were not standardized:
| AltGr (right Alt) + hyphen (to the left of right Shift)
| produces an em-dash, and press Shift on top, and you get an en-
| dash.
|
| This is how long I've had them easily accessible on any
| keyboard (I even have them converted to MacOS keyboard layouts
| for use with Karabiner).
|
| http://srpski.org/dunav/raspored-c.html
| PhunkyPhil wrote:
| Iphones will autocorrect two hyphens to an em dash
| op00to wrote:
| My LLM prompts all have "don't use em dashes or semicolons
| ever" when I send the output to someone else. ;)
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| I disagree--LLMs don't use them properly. They always put a
| space between the words before - and after - the dashed part.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Using spaces is not wrong. Typographically, a hair space or
| another thinner than usual space is usually used, but in
| plain text a space is often preferred. Style guides vary of
| opinion on this, but newspapers often space them. Without a
| space they end up looking like elongated hyphens joining the
| words on both sides. That's not their function.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| This is US vs British English. You will struggle to find an
| em dash in any British publication.
| AstralSerenity wrote:
| "Windows" + "." brings up symbols, and at the very top were em
| dashes. I've been using that since it was added.
|
| On my Linux laptop, I confess to manually Googling them every
| time.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I've tried to use real hyphens and dashes since learning a bit
| about typography roughly 10-15 years ago. macOS makes it really
| easy with just alt and hyphen for en-dash, shift+alt and hyphen
| for em-dash. Definitely not an "obvious tell" of an LLM!
| starfezzy wrote:
| The lack of em dash usage in popular culture speaks more about
| typical people than it does about whether a text's author was
| an LLM. In fact, the average person has never even noticed--let
| alone considered--that the em dash exists. If they've read for
| 20+ years, they've seen at LEAST hundreds of them.
|
| Imagine being an NPC (a human bot), flattering yourself with
| the thought that people who understand the language are
| language bots...
| metaphor wrote:
| I use --- to represent em dash in prose here, e.g. [1][2]. The
| behavior is just a residual of long time exposure to TeX.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41833665
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41774199
| beejiu wrote:
| If em dashes were uncommon pre-2022, they wouldn't have ended
| up in the LLM training sets.
| account-5 wrote:
| I recently got accused of using AI for some writing I submitted
| because I regularly use both en-dashes and em-dashes, and have
| for years. I said in another thread recently they are second
| and third, to semi-colons, as my favourite punctuation marks.
|
| I was able to demonstrate my long use of them, prior to LLMs.
| And since I write in quarto markdown I don't need keyboard
| shortcuts.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I have typed Alt+0151 almost every day for decades--and now
| with some annoyance I am limiting their use due to the "that's
| how LLMs write."
| the__alchemist wrote:
| If you're on Windows, install PowerToys, and check out the
| KeyBoard manager. It lets you set up shortcuts. I overload my
| keys using right alt for greek letters. (science stuff). Could do
| it for these dashes as well.
| a3w wrote:
| > spans pages 128-34.
|
| Who omits the 1 from the second number?! That is aweful!
| mkehrt wrote:
| What if it's 124 to 127? would you really type 124-127, or
| 124-7?
| wavemode wrote:
| > would you really type 124-127
|
| literally yes
| rossant wrote:
| The latter, I believe.
| eCa wrote:
| > would you really type 124-127?
|
| Yes, every time. The clarity for the reader is more important
| than the time I save by leaving out '12'.
| rossant wrote:
| When I was editing an academic book published by a well-known
| university press, we were all asked to do that for the
| references. (And my colleagues, all doctors and lawyers, only
| knew Word and entered the references manually.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Who _keeps_ the 1?
|
| You write pages 1,003-4, instead of typing out 1,003-1,004
| which is just unnecessary.
|
| Works the same with two digits, or even three: pp. 1,899-902.
|
| This is standard practice and arguably clearer.
|
| I've only ever seen it done with page ranges, though. I'm not
| sure if it's done with year ranges? E.g. 1984-5? Or 1989-92?
| You work with page ranges constantly in academia, I just don't
| see year ranges much in _any_ form.
| zahlman wrote:
| $ python -m this | grep '--' -
| nextts wrote:
| As long as "this" is not a typical README.md with code
| snippets.
| rednafi wrote:
| I like em dashes and use "Option Shift -" to summon them on
| macOS. However, LLMs tend to overuse them and compose absurdly
| long sentences. While proofreading a draft, I often instruct an
| LLM to "keep the original tone intact and don't create overly
| complex sentences by fusing together simple ones." That usually
| gets the job done.
|
| Writers adores their em dashes. While they can sometimes clarify
| a concept by adding more context, overusing them can hurt
| readability. I prefer to read Hemingway-esque sentences that just
| say what they want to say and end sharply. So that's how I write
| too--and sometimes the overuse of em dashes directly conflicts
| with that, making the content sound as if the author is confused
| about what they wanted to convey.
| sandbach wrote:
| Robert Bringhurst1 prefers the en dash in the context of setting
| off phrases:
|
| "The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed
| in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for
| use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between
| sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of
| Victorian typography.
|
| "Used as a phrase marker - thus - the en dash is set with a
| normal word space either side."
|
| 1https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780881791327/page/80/mode/...
| asplake wrote:
| I think of that as "British" style (as opposed to American). I
| think it's more common here and I certainly prefer it
| tkcranny wrote:
| Presently re-reading this book, The Elements of Typographic
| Style. It's one of the few books I've gone out of my way to get
| a physical copy of - it's just beautiful.
|
| And I totally agree, space-set en dashes are vastly superior to
| em. I dislike the way it connects the word more closely to the
| word in the next clause than the phrase itself.
|
| E.g. He left--no explanation. Vs. He left - no explanation.
|
| To me, left--no feels like a weird gluing together than a
| separator for a different section.
| munificent wrote:
| Because I am exactly the kind of person to obsess about this
| sort of thing, when I was working on my last book, I spent a
| lot of time deciding how I wanted to style dashed subordinate
| clauses.
|
| Personally, I think en dashes are too small and look like a
| mistaken use of a hyphen. I really only use them in their
| Chicago Manual of Style recommended uses like date ranges.
|
| But I agree that em dashes without spaces around them look
| wrong. They glue the adjoining words together when the whole
| point is that the clause is secondary and should be set aside
| from the surrounding text.
|
| I ended up using em dashes with a little blob of CSS to put a
| tiny amount of space on either side.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Somewhat off topic, however, I'm thoroughly convinced that there
| is a very high probability something is AI generated when I see
| Em dashes. Anyone else noticing this?
|
| ChatGPT for example almost always uses them. I'm sure they are
| more common in academic writing, but its now super common on
| boards like Reddit.
| mychaelangelo wrote:
| I've noticed this, too. ChatGPT especially overuses them
| relative to other models. It's an easy tell-sign that something
| is probably LLM-written.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I saw a reel the other day where some Young People(tm) were
| talking about "the ChatGPT hyphen" (an em-dash.) There was
| much wailing and gnashing of (false) teeth from Old
| People(tm) in the comments.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's largely the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. You've started
| noticing it because you just learned about it.
| dkdcwashere wrote:
| yep. been using them for years. others have too. it's not
| weird
|
| same thing happened with "delve" -- these are just words and
| grammar, people use them
|
| there is no accurate way to tell whether text came out of a
| neural network or not
| chatmasta wrote:
| I'm not sure the same happened with "delve." I saw an
| analysis of paper abstracts showing a clear uptick of
| "delve" starting with the mass-adoption of ChatGPT. Maybe
| it suddenly became a trendy word -- especially in paper
| abstracts -- or maybe more paper abstracts were edited by
| ChatGPT.
| kingo55 wrote:
| Combining the various "tells" of an LLM (em dashes, delve,
| grammatical signs etc) with the context (Reddit comments vs
| professional setting), you could establish a rough
| probability it was AI generated. At this point, it's the
| best we can hope for.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Gemini is in love with the phrase "It's important to..."
|
| Whenever I see that at the start of a paragraph I know that
| there's an 80% chance it was written by Gemini.
| awestley wrote:
| Yes! It's a tell-tale sign something is written by AI.
| dkdcwashere wrote:
| it is not
| encypherai wrote:
| Yes, several of the most popular (and even lesser-popular but
| newly open-sourced models such as Gemma 3 27b) overuse Em
| dashes. Even when prompting them to not use dashes, they almost
| can't help themselves and include them occasionally anyways as
| it must be part of their learned stylometry. It's just not a
| common symbol to use at all as most people generally use commas
| for the same purpose. I can't even remember learning about Em
| dashes in my college english classes.
| nextos wrote:
| I submitted an application which I typeset using LaTeX, and
| some people thought it was AI-generated because of en and em
| dashes. I have been using these since forever.
| dskhatri wrote:
| There are regular folk who tend to be pedantic with their
| writing. I'm not sure this is a good test of whether text is
| generated by LLM. Consider that some may use LLMs to correct
| spelling or grammar, and the LLMs may often edit an en dash to
| em dash.
| kbenson wrote:
| If it's posted through a publishing platform (not just a
| commend on one or on a public site), it's very possible they do
| an automatic conversion of some of the common cases. That could
| also be filtering down to comment boxes and stuff, I'm not
| sure.
|
| That's not to say that generated content doesn't use them, just
| that using them as an indicator might require a bit of nuance
| based on where you're seeing them.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I've been employing em-dashes extensively since I went on a JD
| Salinger binge circa 2002. Also, "incidentally", for the same
| reason. I use "Nb" a lot, from reading a bunch of DFW years
| ago. Oh, and that very-precise construction he does with
| "which" all the time, I stole that.
|
| Before LLMs, I think em-dashes mostly signaled that you read
| books and paid attention to details, to the extent they
| signaled anything.
| culi wrote:
| Everyone I know that writes a lot, especially for copy or
| product design, seems to use em dashes more heavily. I've even
| seen a Drake format meme where he is shaking his head at
| parantheses, commas, and colons but--finally--nodding in
| approval at the em dash.
|
| I wonder if it's a more recent phenomenon.
| nilkn wrote:
| I've encountered and used em dashes regularly for the last 20
| years. If most of your reading and writing are associated with
| social media, I could see the trend you're describing appearing
| real within that limited context. But em dashes are not new and
| have been a feature of high quality writing for many decades.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| minus (US negative) enters the chat..
| crazygringo wrote:
| Seriously. If you want your - + to match, in terms of crossbar
| vertical position and width.
| culi wrote:
| For comparison--
|
| - + minus sign
|
| - + hyphen
|
| - + en dash
|
| -- + em dash
|
| -+-+-+--
| cporios wrote:
| if anyone's wondering, the post title is wrong -- both of the
| first two characters are en dashes (U+2013).
| babypuncher wrote:
| Or, you can avoid an awful lot of headache by just sticking to
| hyphens.
| culi wrote:
| > If you want to be official about things, use the en dash to
| replace a hyphen in compound adjectives when at least one of the
| elements is a two-word compound.
|
| How is a literal dictionary making fun of people who "wanna be
| official about things" lol. That's the entire basis for
| dictionaries themselves
| mikethemerry wrote:
| It's Merriam-Webster - they are descriptivist rather than
| prescriptivist about language. They don't define correct usage
| per se, but rather document actual usage, though some usage may
| be given greater weight than others.
|
| In this case, they are calling out the prescriptivist
| definition but are implying that it may be overkill and
| offering the more commonly used alternative.
| nayuki wrote:
| Additionally:
|
| * Use the minus sign /-/ (U+2212) when formatting numbers,
| because the default hyphen-minus /-/ (U+2D) just looks wrong: "It
| is -1 degC vs. -1 degC." Moreover, the correct minus has the same
| width as plus (- vs. +).
|
| * Rare, but use the figure dash /-/ (U+2012) or figure space / /
| (U+2007) if you need a placeholder character that is the same
| width as a single digit. For example, "Guess the PIN: 1-34."
| ludicity wrote:
| I use em-dashes correctly because a reader emailed me, and I was
| dreadfully embarrassed. You can actually see them become correct
| in my writing after the "I will pile drive you" AI thing.
|
| It never occurred to me that doing this correctly might make
| people think I use LLMs in my writing.
|
| Edit: I'm sure the many typos protect me from that, actually.
| o11c wrote:
| One point that is very rarely mentioned is how to place em dashes
| around quotations marks.
|
| If the em dash indicates an interruption (not a planned pause) of
| the actual speech, the em dashes go inside the quotes (often just
| one, before the closing quote).
|
| If the em dash is the narrator interjecting with additional
| information, the em dashes go outside the quotes.
|
| Besides this, the question of where to put spaces when multiple
| forms of punctuation are combined can be quite a complex topic.
| numbers wrote:
| On macOS you can enter these by doing the following:
|
| * em dash: [?] + | + - (alt + shift + hyphen)
|
| * en dash: [?] + - (alt + hyphen)
| appleorchard46 wrote:
| Hot take - differentiating between these at all is dumb. There is
| virtually no situation when using one instead of another improves
| clarity.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| I refuse to care about this. A single dash is all I will ever
| use. I see no possible reason to use the other two.
| theelous3 wrote:
| Throwing my hat in here. The sub millimeter difference in the
| length of a dash conveys no additional meaning or clarity. It
| is impossible to argue me out of this position.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Length of breath/pause with a longer dash. Read some -- Emily
| Dickinson poems - you'll find a world --- of meaning --- in
| the millimeter.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| uh, really?
|
| i really like using em dashes -- for some reason, it feels
| "better" in my head than using something like a comma or a
| semi-colon.
| lioeters wrote:
| That's the comment I was looking for to rally behind. I use the
| same character `-` for all purposes: minus, hyphen, em/en dash.
| It's easy to type and it makes practically no difference in
| meaning or legibility. I refuse to waste my time
| differentiating between multiple variations of a short
| horizontal line with a few pixels more or less. Ain't nobody
| got time for that.
| colanderman wrote:
| Note also that the "hyphen" on your keyboard is actually a
| "hyphen-minus". Unicode provides separate characters for hyphen
| (-) and minus (-).
| phkahler wrote:
| Let's not forget the minus symbol at U2212. I was making a
| Simulink like diagram editor and the dashes just didn't look
| good. 2212 worked nicely.
| starfezzy wrote:
| We need a blog post documenting the ironic trend of people--
| themselves NPCs, actual human bots, just now realizing the em
| dash exists despite seeing it hundreds if not thousands of times
| before LLMs--flattering themselves by suggesting that anyone who
| understands the language at above a 5th grade level must be an
| LLM.
| dankwizard wrote:
| a human has never used an em dash in the wild
| apparent wrote:
| This shows both the en dashes and hyphens for page ranges. Is one
| preferred?
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