On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 08:47:37PM +0200, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
<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.
A formal reference?
No; not off hand.
Just personal experience from 35 years or so of reading American typesetting, and at least 15 years of paying professional attention thereto.
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.
You've seen commercial typesetting (that is, typesetting done by typographers, not computer scientists :-) that put full spaces around em-dashes?
I'd be interested in references myself, if you could lay hands on any.
It's a topic I'm close to, because my instinct is to want to render standard typesetting as closely as possible in ASCII, but I just can't bring myself to set ASCII em dashes--you know, these things--without the surrounding spaces -- even though that's how I see them set in type.
Cheers, -- jra