Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
But if you are changing mdashes to ndashes in a book for posting to MR, please let us know you've done this so we can decide if we want that version or not. Thanks.
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Wolfie, don't be ungracious. If he posts a book to the MR library, and he's used ndashes instead of em, you can always regex them back.
Alex: I didn't mean anything exotic. Simply that I'd type/regex them like so:
But wait--" John held his breath...yadda.
She wondered... did he mean what she thought he meant?
So that the code would look thus:
But wait—" John held his breath...yadda.
She wondered… did he mean what she thought he meant?
And those are regular spaces in there, not nbsp's. This allows the words to break on Kindle devices (yes, I know what forums we're in), which if joined, they wouldn't do.
We vary, here, in final output, because our clients get their knickers in a twist, particularly about ellipses. Honestly, until I started this business, I had no idea that so few people understood the difference between an ellipsis and an emdash, nor that so many thought that a 4-dot ellipsis was a "real" thing,
in, or at the end of, a sentence, nor that so many could type either so many different ways. It's...interesting.
We see the ellipsis used to mean a sudden break in speech all the time, and an emdash used to mean trailing off. There are actual discussions about those being the "real" usages for those, in the KDP forums (to which I invariably reply, because it pains me). And, as I said, typographically, man, they are all over the map. They want a space before and after (either or both). A space after (ditto), space before...it's pretty damn endless.
Hitch