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Re: em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens in help / intranet / internet documentation

Subject: Re: em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens in help / intranet / internet documentation
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: John Cook <john -dot- cook -at- gmail -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:38:00 -0500

John Cook wrote:


Besides that, I'm curious about the way that these are used in the
real world as things get more web-centric.


Depends what you mean by the real world. I use them everywhere but email and similar ASCII-only media, following Chicago style. What I've observed in "the real world" as defined by most authors and editors, though, is that hardly anyone has a clue about when to use which dash, or even that anything other than a hyphen exists.

The gotcha in your original request is in going between output media. You need to ensure that any HTML-based output meets current W3C guidelines for special entities. That requires using up-to-date tools that know an em dash is [delete spaces in the following] "& m d a s h ;" rather than "& # 1 5 1 ; ," for example, because the latter may break in some browsers, depending on the encoding specified in the document.


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References:
em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens in help / intranet / internet documentation: From: John Cook
Re: em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens in help / intranet / internet documentation: From: arroxaneullman
Re: em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens in help / intranet / internet documentation: From: John Cook

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