Quote:
Originally Posted by nabsltd
It shouldn't be. It's punctuation just like any other, and should always "glue" to the previous characters.
I've never seen a typeset book (where things like line breaks are manually controlled) where an em-dash immediately preceded by a letter starts a line, with the letter on the previous line.
If there is no space before the character that drops to the next line, then, yeah, that's horribly broken.
Assuming no automatic hyphenation using a dictionary, white space is the only place a line should break in HTML. If a break has to be forced because there just isn't any white space (or no white space near enough to allow reasonably sized spaces in justified text), then breaking after a punctuation mark and before a non punctuation mark is the only choice that matches the style of nearly 100 years of typesetting.
My problem is that I read with a renderer that follow line break rules strictly, and won't break after punctuation that often has no spaces around it (em- and en-dashes, ellipsis, etc.), so I get some very weird spacing on justified lines with at lot of those characters. My solution is to put a thin space (&thinsp  after those kind of marks. It is almost not visible, but allows breaking where it should happen. |
For a couple of years at least, Amazon Kindle will start a new line before or after a hyphen or an en or emdash even when there is no space. In the early days, I got into the habit of avoiding hyphens whenever I could, and adopting British style for dash (that is, space/dash/space) in order to avoid rivers of white. This is no longer necessary, though I continue to do it because I decided I preferred it. Like the Oxford comma, it's one of those flourishes that makes sentences easier to read.