Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett Merkey
Not to extend your em-dash agony—
[...]
Em-dashes are such fun—at least in English. They do not follow the rules of other punctuation.
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Yes, I agree. They should go on the inside. (I didn't like that specific Em Dash form in the Fiction Editor's article, even though I agree with her recommendations in 99.9% of her other articles.)
And you should always err on matching the original source when you can... it's not a good idea to make a broad style change like that for no reason.
I also reference the Wikipedia page on Em Dashes quite often:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash
if you want to know about different usages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phossler
I'm still curious to know what the character is actually used for
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Dang, I had a whole giant technical post written about it... but then I deleted it because I misread an earlier post.
I'll try to piece together some of the research I found on it.
It seems like "Start of Protected Area" and "End of Protected Area" were from the ol' terminal days:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes
which says were used in Block-Oriented Terminals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block-...ented_terminal
It was used while filling out forms and things like that, so that you couldn't go outside of the bounds (imagine limiting to a 16 character last name, trying to type a 17th character wouldn't let you + make a beep).
It was also used so that certain blocks of text wouldn't go scrolling off the screen as the terminal moved down.
A lot of those old control codes were included in Unicode for legacy reasons, but outside a small handful, the rest are barely used nowadays.