On 6/22/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com 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.
This is something that was in the 1.5 development tree before release but pulled out just before release due to issues with doing dumb -- to emdash replacement in the not-a-parser. One case I remember it breaking on was image names which contained --, links around -- ([[foo|bar]]--[[bar|foo]] didn't work etc.)