How I Format Em Dashes

::: foreword This post mostly consists of a chatroom correspondence I engaged in on the listed date (2024-10-24), but extracted and edited in 2026-03-14, as a digression to be included in my post about markdown, but I ultimately cut it. ::: Famously, when authors make even the smallest typographic error with their dash, I always notice. That's a link to my tumblr, and for posterity, it's a thread with the following posts: ::: details Thread: click to []{.prompt} - "how autistic are you about typography" i notice when authors use en dashes instead of em dashes. honestly? worst of both worlds. i don't like it when they use hyphens, but at least i can understand simply using what your keyboard gives you; there's a compelling elegance but if you're going out of your way—or simply have the software support—to insert unicode symbols, why are you using the wrong one - this is hell for real. i always notice. not all authors appreciate typo reports, and i feel it's got to be doubly unhinged to slide into a comment section like "your dashes are a few pixels shorter than they should be, please fix", but it's genuinely distracting. get me out of here - dawg i just spotted this in a peer-reviewed academic paper. what has the world come to. save us - i've had arguments with a writer who uses en dashes on purpose—they don't like how long they are—but they also put spaces around their dashes so it's kind of a problem they themselves created. still, i guess people who use en dashes also put spaces around them, so in a way it's kind of equivalent to the people who use the ascii hyphen-minus but nope, today i am reading a fic that uses unspaced en dashes! are writers looking at the text? how do you catch typos and misplaced commas but not notice the words dashed too close together? ::: In a chatroom, this prompted a discussion where a friend railed against ever using non-ASCII characters.^[Not only are they not a native english speaking, for years they'd had a cyrillic character in their name just to fuck with people. Moreover, they use Google Docs to write their fiction and they haven't even disabled the setting that automatically replaces ASCII quotes with curly quotes!] But this prompted me to wonder: how many special characters do I use, in general? "Curly quotes" of course, em dashes --- with the occasionally en dash --- and of course ellipses... that's the standard toolkit. I have writen special filters that precisely control the spacing around em dashes. Specifically, my em dashes are wrapped like: ------ -- U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER U+2009 THIN SPACE U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER U+2014 EM DASH U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER U+2009 THIN SPACE ------ -- I use thin spaces as a compromise between what style-guides recommend---no spaces---and the increasingly common informal style of putting spaces-around them.^[Which I have erred toward every since one (1) person complained about the readability of unspaced dashes eight years ago.] The zero width joiners control where the browser is allowed to split the line when wrapping text, obviating another typographical wart of the spaces around style; these control characters "glue" the spaces and the dash to the preceding word, so that the only legal place to wrap the line is after the dash. This prevents the rare ugliness --- and parsing hiccups --- of a line that starts with a dash. I do something similar with a differen purpose when it comes to hyphens. Hyphenated words look like: ------ --- U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE ------ --- That ZWS is purely a hack for tricking ao3's word-counting algorithm.^Motivated by the time I wrote [drabbles.] Normally, hyphenated words are counted as a single word, but this forces them to be counted separatedly. These past few years my prose has developed a slight tic of poetically hyphenated words,^[a lot of them are kennings, but I think it's a bit broader of a device.] which means counting hyphenated words seperatedly results in an overall more accurate counts. ...With all that said, I'm not entirely sure what I was cooking with the joiner. I think that one is a hack to control how the browser splits lines when wrapping hyphenated words? But it's not clear to me that it's even necessary.