Quote:
Originally Posted by hapax legomenon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash
I researched this issue a few months ago. My solution is to rarely use the em dash and use the en dash instead.
word ndash word
Why? To do the mdash correctly, you need to allow no spaces between the words. But that often is impractical for browsers and even word processors because it will join the words together when determining end of line.
Ndash doesn't look long enough, but actually it looks good enough in most fonts.
Odd fact: I type my fiction in a simple text editor which has an html conversion feature. It doesn't do the em/en dashes properly though, so I end up spelling the word "ndash" and then doing a global substitution. When you are doing that kind of substitution, it's easier to be able to substitute the ndash; entity for a word that is separated from the adjoining words. That's a use case specific to my editor; however, I imagine that it's just easier to work with ndashes in general.
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Some publishers (Penguin I think) have standardised on en dashes. I must admit I'm still attached to em dashes in a nostalgic sort of way. ditto with curly quotes.