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
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)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
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
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