Chris BONDE wrote:
This is what I thought. Not knowing too much about the distinction I just
lurked.
But now I know some of the difference in typography (size but not how) I would like
to know the differences in use.
Both en-dash and em-dash are used for normal dash usage, depending on
preference. There is a tendency today to either use en-dash surrounded
by spaces or em-dash with no spaces around it.
This is why MS Word and OpenOffice Write both default to automatically
changing a double hyphen surrounded by spaces into an en-dash but a
double-hyphen with no spaces surrounding it into an em-dash. It provides
most people with what they want.
But some still prefer em-dash with spaces or en-dash with no spaces. It
used to be common in old hard typography to use an em-dash surrounded by
very narrow spaces. But today in many fonts these narrow spaces are
built into the em-dash character (but in other fonts they are not).
En-dash (but not em-dash) also has another special use as a short way of
indicating the word "to" in a series. In "79-85" (meaning "79 to 85") or
"J-P" (meaning "J to P") the character I have rendered here as a hyphen
would be an en-dash in good typography.
Of course in phone numbers and product codes and such when the
horizontal line does not mean "to" a regular hyphen character is used.
But in this usage one should normally use a no-break hyphen
(SHIFT-CTRL-hyphen in OpenOffice) to prevent the phone number or code
from breaking at the end of a line.
We should probably look at the differences in ( ) [ ] { } < >, as they are not all
parentheses, or brackets.
The first three sets are properly variant parentheses or brackets with
meanings that vary in different contexts and in different technical
notations. The last two are in origin symbols for "less than" and
"greater than" (or sometimes "from" and "to") but have come to be used
as substitutes for angle brackets because they are easily available on
computers. They are now so accepted even in fine typography in many
technical notations. The old proper angle brackets are Unicode
characters U+27E8 and U+27E9.
Jallan
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