{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/posts/dash-typography",
  "path": "/posts/posts/dash-typography",
  "publishedAt": "2024-10-24T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "::: foreword\n\nThis post mostly consists of a chatroom correspondence I engaged in on\nthe listed date (2024-10-24), but extracted and edited in 2026-03-14,\nas a digression to be included in my post about\nmarkdown, but I ultimately cut it.\n\n:::\n\nFamously, when authors make even the smallest typographic error with\ntheir dash, I always\nnotice.\n\nThat's a link to my tumblr, and for posterity, it's a thread with the\nfollowing posts:\n\n::: details\n\nThread: click to []{.prompt}\n\n- \"how autistic are you about typography\" i notice when authors use en\n  dashes instead of em dashes.\n\n  honestly?  worst of both worlds.  i don't like it when they use\n  hyphens, but at least i can understand simply using what your\n  keyboard gives you; there's a compelling elegance but if you're\n  going out of your way—or simply have the software support—to insert\n  unicode symbols, why are you using the wrong one\n- this is hell for real.  i always notice.  not all authors\n  appreciate typo reports, and i feel it's got to be doubly unhinged\n  to slide into a comment section like \"your dashes are a few pixels\n  shorter than they should be, please fix\", but it's genuinely\n  distracting.  get me out of here\n- dawg i just spotted this in a peer-reviewed academic paper.  what\n  has the world come to.  save us\n- i've had arguments with a writer who uses en dashes on purpose—they\n  don't like how long they are—but they also put spaces around their\n  dashes so it's kind of a problem they themselves created.  still, i\n  guess people who use en dashes also put spaces around them, so in a\n  way it's kind of equivalent to the people who use the ascii\n  hyphen-minus\n \n  but nope, today i am reading a fic that uses unspaced en dashes!\n \n  are writers looking at the text?  how do you catch typos and\n  misplaced commas but not notice the words dashed too close together?\n\n:::\n\nIn a chatroom, this prompted a discussion where a friend railed\nagainst ever using non-ASCII characters.^[Not only are they not a\nnative english speaking, for years they'd had a cyrillic character in\ntheir name just to fuck with people.  Moreover, they use Google Docs\nto write their fiction and they haven't even disabled the setting\nthat automatically replaces ASCII quotes with curly quotes!]  But\nthis prompted me to wonder: how many special characters do I use, in\ngeneral?\n\n\"Curly quotes\" of course, em dashes --- with the occasionally en dash\n--- and of course ellipses... that's the standard toolkit.\n\nI have writen special filters that precisely control the spacing\naround em dashes.\n\nSpecifically, my em dashes are wrapped like:\n\n------ --\nU+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER\nU+2009 THIN SPACE\nU+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER\nU+2014 EM DASH\nU+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER\nU+2009 THIN SPACE\n------ --\n\nI use thin spaces as a compromise between what style-guides\nrecommend---no spaces---and the increasingly common informal style of\nputting spaces-around them.^[Which I have erred toward every since one\n(1) person complained about the readability of unspaced dashes eight\nyears ago.]\n\nThe zero width joiners control where the browser is allowed to split\nthe line when wrapping text, obviating another typographical wart of\nthe spaces around style; these control characters \"glue\" the spaces\nand the dash to the preceding word, so that the only legal place to\nwrap the line is after the dash.  This prevents the rare ugliness ---\nand parsing hiccups --- of a line that starts with a dash.\n\nI do something similar with a differen purpose when it comes to\nhyphens.  Hyphenated words look like:\n\n------ ---\nU+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER\nU+002D HYPHEN-MINUS\nU+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE\n------ ---\n\nThat ZWS is purely a hack for tricking ao3's word-counting\nalgorithm.^Motivated by the time I wrote\n[drabbles.] Normally, hyphenated\nwords are counted as a single word, but this forces them to be counted\nseparatedly.  These past few years my prose has developed a slight tic\nof poetically hyphenated words,^[a lot of them are kennings, but I\nthink it's a bit broader of a device.] which means counting hyphenated\nwords seperatedly results in an overall more accurate counts.\n\n...With all that said, I'm not entirely sure what I was cooking with\nthe joiner.  I think that one is a hack to control how the browser\nsplits lines when wrapping hyphenated words?  But it's not clear to me\nthat it's even necessary.",
  "title": "How I Format Em Dashes"
}