Talk:Dash/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

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Usage statistics

Most people use the minus sign: (-) as a dash sign: [ a. short dash: (–), b. long dash (—) ] inbetween words. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:582:5821:E400:6DE0:C7C1:3118:3720 (talk) 12:59, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

En dash vs. figure dash to indicate a range of values

In the interest of maintaining a neutral point of view in the section Similar Unicode Characters, I just changed the claim that the figure dash is the "preferred character to denote intervals" to say only that it "may be preferred" to the en dash. Perhaps that's still too strong. The subsection on the usage of the en dash calls connecting the ends of a range one of its main uses while the Figure dash section says that the en dash is more appropriate for this purpose. Perhaps the article should more rigorously avoid expressing any point of view as to which is better suited or whether, in accordance with the AMA manual of style (see the subsection on Ranges of values), the hyphen is better than either. Peter Brown (talk) 19:13, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Removed names "n dash" and "m dash"

Nobody uses "n dash" or "m dash", HTML codes notwithstanding. Note that the hits in books for "m dash" are all for authors (M. Dash) and races (100 m dash). And don't stick hyphens in them, as a few do. Dicklyon (talk) 04:21, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

Split en/em dash articles?

Is there a reason that En dash and Em dash don't have their own articles? They're certainly long enough and have deep enough trees of subsections to justify splitting them. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 23:25, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

This article is well within WP:LENGTH. How would splitting serve reader or editorial interests? The average reader doesn't know the names "en dash" and "em dash"; the average reader may well not even know these characters serve sometimes different, sometimes overlapping functions. There's no requirement that WP have a separate article for every character in Unicode.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  14:39, 9 November 2017 (UTC)T

The sections on En dash versus em dash and Rendering dashes on computers are common to the two types of dashes. Splitting them would accomplish nothing and would be unnecessary labor. Peter Brown (talk) 00:58, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

I don't see any value in splitting the dash article. The redirects on en dash and em dash are effective for directing people to the correct information within article. Carter (talk) 14:46, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

I would normally agree to a split but because of the common sections as Peter Brown says above, I think there is more value in keeping them together. The number of subsections is a little unwieldy but that is more a matter of presentation. The Wikipedia stylesheets could use some improvement there. ··gracefool 💬 21:43, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

As a different option, perhaps a spin-off page for En dash and em dash would be reasonable? Pages like Perihelion and aphelion suggest some precedent for that type of naming. "Rendering dashes on computers" would stay here, "En dash versus em dash" would get moved. power~enwiki (π, ν) 19:17, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

That sounds like the worst of all worlds, treating them together but not in the dash article. Let's leave it here with separate sections for these dash usages, please. Dicklyon (talk) 19:45, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

I support a split, because people are coming to Wikipedia in order to look for system- or program-specific ways to render a specific character without having to wade through paragraphs upon paragraphs of boring text. What they usually want, is a key combination in a simple and concise format (in a table), and not to read the entire history of the character. As I don't see any how-to tables with specific key combinations, then it seems, that someone must have removed the tables. -Mardus /talk 11:35, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

• Turns out, that the table is there after all, but badly ordered. -Mardus /talk 11:41, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Common dashes → less common dashes not readable

Don't know anything about dashes but two examples are not showing up for me in the text of either the article or the editing window. The sentence with them in is:

"Less common are the two-em dash (⸺) and three-em dash (⸻), both added to Unicode with version 6.1 as U+2E3A and U+2E3B."

Using Safari browser they appear as unfilled squares. Using Firefox each one appears as four tiny letters and numbers, enclosed in parentheses.

MATERIALS USED:
MacBook Pro computer, 17-inch, mid 2010
Mac OS 10.13.4
Safari version 11.1
Firefox 59.0.1
Moonsell (talk) 12:10, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm using Firefox 59.0.3 on a PC laptop running Windows 10; I have no problem and haven't since at least Version 57. Perhaps the problem is in the OS, not the browser? Peter Brown (talk) 20:56, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

The stated length of em dash

Just a silly question.. Why the entry says that em dash is "twice as long as the en dash", when clearly, right before our eyes it is shown to be not true? Em dash is like 5-10% longer from en dash. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.245.82.2 (talk) 07:42, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Reasonable point. I'm sure it's not double the length. Tony (talk) 08:38, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I agree; it's not. But some sources say it is. I think that's an outmoded concept. Certainly not consistent with the other usual claim or lengths being widths of letters n and m. Dicklyon (talk) 23:43, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Introduction

Hi Editors,

I changed the "em dash" wikilink in the introduction to direct to the em dash section on this page, to maintain consistency with the "en dash" wikilink. What we could consider is, if the discussion of en's and em's are better on this page than on [[En {typography)]] and Em (typography), would it be worth it copying some of this article into those articles?

Cheers, Egroeg5 (talk) 02:35, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Egroeg5, I was the one who introduced the inconsistency; "en dash" used to link to En (typography) but the discussion there is far inferior to that in Dash, so I changed the link. Em (typography), in contrast, is a superb article, so I left that link alone. Pending further discussion, I am reverting your edit so that the reader is encouraged to look at Em (typography). Inconsistency is a small price to pay.

I would oppose the idea of cluttering up Em (typography) with material from Dash.

Peter Brown (talk) 03:13, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Dear Peter, thanks for explaining your reasoning, which I find solid. I suppose the inconsistency can be ignored, and I'm happy to leave the article as is. Cheers, Egroeg5 (talk) 12:00, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

www.congress.gov

@Peter M. Brown: Although https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/2356 is nominally text/html; charset=UTF-8, de facto it is ASCII-only. Appealing to such sites in respect to dashes is as fool as asking for Sudan’s opinion on human rights, the Russian government about transparency, or the PRC about freedom of expression. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 08:07, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Congress.gov is ASCII-only? I didn't know that. Given the many laws normally designated by a pair of names, this is noteworthy enough for an article to say so (assuming that you have a reliable source). The Dash article seems a reasonable place, since the limitation is mainly manifested by the use of hyphen-minuses that ought to be en dashes in the designation of laws.

It follows, I suppose, that www.congress.gov cannot properly render the names of Representatives Velázquez and Sánchez.

How about the websites of state legislatures? The legislative bodies of other nations? Have you reliably-sourced information about these? Peter Brown (talk) 16:02, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

I don’t assert that the whole web site can’t say “á” (which, by the way, is simply a-stressed and may be safely replaced with “a” for non-Spanish users). I only remarked that the Web page on the cited URL is ASCII-only. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 16:22, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

OK, forget á. That's a very minor point. The rest of my comment stands. Have you a source for the limitation to ASCII? If so, the information belongs in an article, either ASCII or Dash.

Peter Brown (talk) 17:14, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

@Incnis Mrsi: How about https://www.govinfo.gov?? Page 2 of this document contains the text

(a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act’’.

using the non-ASCII characters ‘,’, and  —  but still referring to the law using the hyphen-minus. Though I cannot source the generalization, my experience is that, whenever laws are identified using the surnames of the US senators and House members who cosponsored them, the names are always joined by a hyphen-minus in official documents. If this is true and can be sourced, it's appropriate matter for inclusion in Wikipedia. In any case, nothing prohibits me from saying that this is sometimes true. Also, in the {{Infobox U.S. legislation}} template for, e.g., the Dodd–Frank article, I can add "Dodd-Frank" as a nickname, can't I? Peter Brown (talk) 01:05, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Appearance of glyphs in monospaced fonts

I removed this paragraph from the end of the mdash section because it is not about mdashes, indeed it includes glyphs that aren't even dashes. I suppose it should go somewhere but I can't see an obvious home for it.

Monospaced fonts that mimic the look of a typewriter have the same width for all characters. Some of these fonts have em and en dashes that more or less fill the monospaced width they have available. For example, the sequence "hyphen, minus, en dash, em dash" shows as - − – — in a monospace font. (The same sequence in a proportional font looks like - − – —).

If it is to stay, it would need hyphen-minus too. I suppose it would need to be in a new section about dash-like glyphs? Comments? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:08, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

No obvious violation of WP:NPOV or WP:NOTGUIDE

@John Maynard Friedman: I am reverting this edit of yours as I cannot see that either WP:NPOV or WP:NOTGUIDE is violated. What of point of view do you think is advocated? And NOTGUIDE says

Describing to the reader how people or things use or do something is encyclopedic; instructing the reader in the imperative mood about how to use or do something is not.

There is no required limit to descriptions of "how people or things use or do something", including detailed use of the numeric encoding of HTML that you find excessive.

Also, your mention of "when en dashes are used in phrasing" is unnecessarily obscure. "Phrasing", per Wikt:phrasing § Noun is "The way a statement is put together, particularly in matters of style and word choice." This covers nearly all uses of the en dash. Perhaps the sentence could read

It is only when en dashes are used in setting off parenthetical expressions  – such as this one – that they take spaces around them.

Peter Brown (talk) 17:50, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

@Peter M. Brown: the npov challenge was the description of spaced ndash as doing the job of emdash, implying that the latter is the correct or reference form. Maybe in the US it is but not elsewhere.

The notguide challenge was to tell readers how to encode the hex or decimal values as HTML. Seriously?

Your suggestion reads fine to me, go ahead. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 21:58, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Done. Macrakis has deleted the material concerning the hex and decimal values. While I still think it unobjectionable, I'll let the deletion stand. Peter Brown (talk) 22:33, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Bringhurst's criticism of the em dash is only one opinion

In Dash § Parenthetic and other uses at the sentence level, it is implied that the spaced en dash gives "clearer typography than 'set close' em-dashes." The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is cited in support. However, as Dash § En dash versus em dash makes quite clear, the matter is controversial; Oxford University Press, among other publishers, prefers the unspaced em dash. I am accordingly labeling as {{Dubious}} the claim that the en dash is clearer. Peter Brown (talk) 02:17, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

True, I should not have expressed it in Wikivoice. I will rephrase it later today to make clear whose opinion it is. [I highly recommend his book, btw. It is free to borrow from the archive.org library.] But just as a an OR observation: tightset emdashes were the norm in Victorian England; they are vanishingly rare today unless the publication has a substantial US market. Nobody made a rule that spaced endashes should be the new normal, typographers just preferred it. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:13, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Comment. I'm not sure increasing use of spaced endashes can be attributed to typographer preference as much as the transition from traditional typesetting to DTP software and autocorrect/autoformatting settings. Personal observation so take it with a grain of salt (and obviously not citable), but I've found that knowledge of how and when to use endashes vs. emdashes vs. hyphens is pretty uncommon even among people who do DTP and layout as a profession (mostly speaking of trade publishing and marcom). —Carter (talk) 12:45, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

@Peter M. Brown: I couldn't find a clever way to fix it, so I have (more or less) reverted to status quo ante. Given that there is a section on en-dash v em-dash – and it is flagged at the beginning of the section – I decided that it would be labouring the point. I should point out that my 'more or less' means that I have discarded the opening words that took unspaced em-dash as the starting point for analysis.

@Tcr25: you are probably right about "the facts on the ground", but Robert Bringhurst (a noted Canadian typographer) is rather emphatic on the subject:

In typescript, a double hyphen (--) is often used for a long dash. Double hyphens in a typeset document are a sure sign that the type was set by a typist, not a typographer. A typographer will use an em dash, three-quarter em, or en dash, depending on context or personal style. The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.

— Robert Bringhurst

Hopefully this resolves the dispute. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:26, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

References

Example of hyphens used as en-dashes

I understand it's Wikipedia policy to use en-dashes for coordinate terms, but in this sentence, it makes no sense to use en-dashes, since it's an example of places where hyphens are used instead. As such, this is is confusing to read:

--

For example, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the AMA Manual of Style, and Dorland's medical reference works use hyphens, not en dashes, in coordinate terms (such as blood–brain barrier), in eponyms (such as Cheyne–Stokes respiration, Kaplan–Meier method), and so on.

--

I had changed it to hyphens, but it got reverted (on 2019-08-21), and I disagree with the reasoning behind the reversion. Like, put a [sic] after each such hyphen if you want, but it's an example, so it should be shown as is, warts and all. IMHO, YMMV, etc. FuturSimple (talk) 17:33, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

New York-London flight

New York-London flight under "En dash § relationships and connections" doesn't make sense:

It states that "New York-London flight" could be misconstrued as a New flight from York to London, and suggests the use of the phrase "New York-to-London". This phrasing has the exact same issue. Should we just use an example other than New York and forget the whole ambiguity bit? EntirelyOnline (talk) 19:16, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Use of en-dashes for description of/elaboration on listed items

Wikipedia, including this article (§"See also"), uses en-dashes to define, elaborate on, and describe items in numbered and bulleted lists; however this article makes no reference to this use case. This use case should be added—either describing it or providing a link elsewhere that does. SMikutsky (talk) 16:05, 26 July 2023 (UTC)