On 6/25/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)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(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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