On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 08:47:37PM +0200, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
On 6/23/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 12:21:28PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
Would requiring spaces on either side of the double dash before converting it into an emdash improve the parsing behavior any?
Please don't.
<snob type=typography> Em dashes are properly set in English text without spacing on either side, though the ASCIIography of this usage is much less picky.
Can you provide a reference for this? Also can you be sure this is the only style and that it doesn't vary by style guide, by publisher, by country, by newspaper vs novels, etc. The reason I ask is that I've been studying casually how they are typeset in books as part of my thinking about an XML format for e-texts. I have seen so many cases both with and without spaces that I've been pondering whether it would best be handled as a style issue.
I think it most definitely is best handled as a style issue, or perhaps as a per-document or per-content-block formatting issue. I still have my preference for spaces, though. They make it look less like an oversized hyphen.