Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Maybe the Author didn't know how to do an em dash?
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Probably chose it out of the character map, and were only going by the visual:
— = Em Dash
– = En Dash
− = Minus Sign
- = Hyphen
Easy mistake to make.
And if you don't even know what an En Dash is, it may look like an error. When I first started digitizing books, I wondered why the heck number ranges looked weird:
✗ See
Semi-Example, pp. 123-135. (Hyphen)
✓ See
Semi-Example, pp. 123–135. (En Dash)
... because I never even
knew a slightly longer dash existed. All you see on the keyboard is a single hyphen button, and that's all I ever typed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
The danger of only proof reading [...] on one platform with embedded fault.
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Yep, that too. Depending on the font, the difference between dashes is nearly indistinguishable:
✗ This is a great ⏤ and I mean great ⏤ example. (U+23E4 Straightness)
✗ This is a great ― and I mean great ― example. (U+2015 Quotation Dash)
✓ This is a great — and I mean great — example. (U+2014 Em Dash)
✗ This is a great − and I mean great − example. (U+2212 Minus Sign)
✓ This is a great – and I mean great – example. (U+2013 En Dash)
✓ This is a great - and I mean great - example. (U+002D Hyphen)
Times New Roman
Arial
Georgia
Garamond
Verdana
Courier New
One tip when proofing is to change the document's font (and margins) from what you originally used. This would make previously "invisible" problems stand out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Compose --- = — em dash
Compose --. = – en dash
By default - on a keyboard in a wordprocessor is hyphen. You'd have to go looking for a minus sign.
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Side Note: I'm not a large fan of relying on autocorrect. It can still miss a lot depending on when/where you typed the dashes/spaces... so I'd always do a final pass to normalize all dashes before publishing.
A few months back, I summarized a ton of my "dash posts" over the years in this LanguageTool enhancement:
#1551: "recommend n-dash instead of m-dash?"
I also explained how a user should be able to choose:
- # and type of spaces
- which dashes to use
based on category (like parentheticals, number ranges, quotes, [...]).
This would allow you to easily normalize the dashes to fit any Style Guide or language.
The only tool I've run across that designed it that way is Antidote (an English/French grammarchecker).