Steve Bennett wrote:
Hi, Many must have informally requested it: would it be possible and desirable to have -- be interpreted as em-dash (—)? It's a very useful symbol, particularly in the context of writing an encyclopaedia, but is not readily available on the keyboard. Many editors already seem to naturally use -- to try and imitate a proper em-dash.
What are the issues involved? Anyone know of other uses of -- that should not be interpreted this way? Is there any argument that it should become some other kind of dash instead?
Also, I realise there are bots that occasionally go around replacing -- with other dashes, but that does seem a bit kludgy.
In the meantime, on en I have created {{--}} which surprisingly no one had thought of creating.
Steve _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
The only example I can think of a use of -- that should not map to emdash is in programming languages like C, where x-- is used to mean "take the value of x and then decrement it"
-- Neil