Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

em dashes: with our without surrounding spaces #26

Open
frivoal opened this issue Apr 17, 2024 · 2 comments
Open

em dashes: with our without surrounding spaces #26

frivoal opened this issue Apr 17, 2024 · 2 comments

Comments

@frivoal
Copy link

frivoal commented Apr 17, 2024

https://speced.github.io/bikeshed/#typography tells us:

Ending a line with -- will turn it into an em dash (—) and pull the following line upwards so there’s no space between the surrounding words and the dash.

in w3c/process#851 (comment), @TallTed said:

Ugh. In my world, em dashes should be surrounded by spaces; en dashes and hyphens typically should not.

The W3C Style Guide points to the Chicago Manual of Style, and "CMOS says no spaces, but importantly their typography actually does have spacing around the em-dash, so basically they’re cheating a bit. AP says spaces."

I don't care strongly either way, but I'm pretty sure that if it should be fixed, it should be fixed globally, and not on a ad hoc basis. Hence reporting it here, as well as against bikeshed.

@tabatkins
Copy link
Member

I'm happy to do whichever pattern we decide on. They're both equal effort in the Bikeshed code, honestly.

(Tho note - in the "put spaces around them" camp, there's also the possibility that they're non-breaking spaces, which I think is somewhat the point of the "no spaces" behavior. That's also equally easy.)

@TallTed
Copy link
Member

TallTed commented Apr 29, 2024

Non-breaking spaces could be used, though I would only put one before an em-dash, so it stays on the same line as the preceding word; there's no need for one after.

The result would be more like this —
which I think flows and looks better
— than like this.

Hopefully that's only a little more work to achieve.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants