Just a suggestion, it would be great if it were easier to do proper dash typography. I find TeX's -/--/--- convention for hyphen/en-dash/em-dash to be fairly intuitive.
Right now, if you do — in the text, it makes things much less readable and is confusing for newbies. The need for these glyphs is so common that wiki support seems worthwhile.
Cordially, Steven G. Johnson
On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 05:13:15PM -0500, Steven G. Johnson wrote:
Just a suggestion, it would be great if it were easier to do proper dash typography. I find TeX's -/--/--- convention for hyphen/en-dash/em-dash to be fairly intuitive.
Right now, if you do — in the text, it makes things much less readable and is confusing for newbies. The need for these glyphs is so common that wiki support seems worthwhile.
Sure, sure, just research the subject "which browsers is it going to break".
Taw (Tomasz Wegrzanowski) wrote:
Steven G. Johnson wrote:
Just a suggestion, it would be great if it were easier to do proper dash typography. I find TeX's -/--/--- convention for hyphen/en-dash/em-dash to be fairly intuitive.
We could go TeX one better and make "----" the quotation dash (―). Although there are a couple of technical problems with /that/. ^_^
Right now, if you do — in the text, it makes things much less readable and is confusing for newbies. The need for these glyphs is so common that wiki support seems worthwhile.
Sure, sure, just research the subject "which browsers is it going to break".
They will appear literally as "–" and "—" on Netscape 4. The last I heard, lots of our visitors were still using that -- but the last I heard was about a year ago, so it may be false now.
This is one reason that /I/ change "—" to "--" when I see it. (The other is ease of editing, which Steven's suggestion would fix.)
There is another possible problem: Since "--" often means an em dash, and is used thus in many Wikimedia pages now (with "-" for an en dash), then a switch in the parsing code should require a conversion of old dashes. Such a conversion will have many exceptions and may be hard to design. However, another possibility is to forget it and let bad en dashes appear; it's a small cosmetic error that people will fix in normal proofreading.
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
We could go TeX one better and make "----" the quotation dash
(―).
Although there are a couple of technical problems with /that/. ^_^
Is '----' only converted into a horizontal rule when on a line by itself? If so, it's less of a problem.
They will appear literally as "–" and "—" on Netscape 4. The last I heard, lots of our visitors were still using that -- but the last I heard was about a year ago, so it may be false now.
This is one reason that /I/ change "—" to "--" when I see it. (The other is ease of editing, which Steven's suggestion would fix.)
Adding support for this in the parser would, for one thing, allow a choice of how the different dashes were rendered. It could be a preferences flag, or possibly even converted differently for NS 4 users. It would certainly mean that, when older browsers have died out, we can phase in better support for dashes.
There is another possible problem: Since "--" often means an em dash, and is used thus in many Wikimedia pages now (with "-" for an en
dash),
then a switch in the parsing code should require a conversion of old dashes. Such a conversion will have many exceptions and may be hard to
design. However, another possibility is to forget it and let bad en
dashes
appear; it's a small cosmetic error that people will fix in normal proofreading.
I'd say let bad dashes appear and be corrected. It would probably just inspire some industrious user to write a 'dashbot' assistant to semi-automatedly fix them, anyhow.
-Matt (User:Morven on WP)
"Steven G. Johnson" stevenj@alum.mit.edu writes:
Just a suggestion, it would be great if it were easier to do proper dash typography. I find TeX's -/--/--- convention for hyphen/en-dash/em-dash to be fairly intuitive.
I used to thought the same, but finally I came to the conclusion: no more ascii art, please. Either use proper proper UTF-8 characters or SGML/XML entities (or better proper SGML or XML).
If you didn't already know, I don't like the new table markup at all - it makes me shy away.
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
"Steven G. Johnson" stevenj@alum.mit.edu writes:
Just a suggestion, it would be great if it were easier to do proper dash typography. I find TeX's -/--/--- convention for hyphen/en-dash/em-dash to be fairly intuitive.
I used to thought the same, but finally I came to the conclusion: no more ascii art, please.
on Unreal Wiki we parse " -- " into — I don't think it counts as ASCII art.
On Friday 16 January 2004 23:13, Steven G. Johnson wrote:
Just a suggestion, it would be great if it were easier to do proper dash typography. I find TeX's -/--/--- convention for hyphen/en-dash/em-dash to be fairly intuitive.
This was mentioned on the Village pump, I just want to say that in C and some other programming languages' sources, -- must remain -- and must not be converted to en-dash. But perhaps this could be solved with <nowiki></nowiki> tags.
Nikola Smokenski writes>
I just want to say that in C and some other programming languages'
sources,
-- must remain -- and must not be converted to en-dash. But perhaps
this
could be solved with <nowiki></nowiki> tags.
I'd go with the solved via nowiki tags. One should not rely on programming language source passing through the parser unscathed in any event.
-Matt (User:Morven on WP)
Matthew Brown wrote:
Nikola Smokenski writes>
I just want to say that in C and some other programming languages'
sources,
-- must remain -- and must not be converted to en-dash. But perhaps
this
could be solved with <nowiki></nowiki> tags.
I'd go with the solved via nowiki tags. One should not rely on programming language source passing through the parser unscathed in any event.
-Matt (User:Morven on WP)
Note that <pre> tags are treated in essentially the same way as <nowiki> tags in the current parser. Hence much of the code in Wikipedia will require no modification.
-- Tim Starling
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