On 6/25/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
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.
I ask for a reference because I've seen people say that serial commas (also known as Harvard commas or Oxford commas) are correct or incorrect whereas in that case it does turn out to depend on region, publisher, etc. but people wrongly assume there is a global rule.
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 can't say for sure whether they were full spaces or half spaces. I do have books from several countries, several eras, and several languages nearby though so I'll try to look through some in the coming days for you.
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.
I'm interesting in typesetting variations like these so that I can normalize e-books to be parsable by machine etc and then perhaps come up with a simple xml dtd that takes as many typing variations existing in plaintext files and turns them into a single standard markup or declaration leaving presentation to styles where it belongs.
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
Cheers,
-- jra
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
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