In print, em dashes are typically surrounded by thin (or hairline) spaces. Unicode provides such space characters but real-world fonts often don't include them, instead rendering them as boxes. The two real-world options are thus regular spaces or no spaces. I prefer regular spaces, for reasons I shan't bore you with. I vaguely remember once reading a web page devoted to illuminating this minor matter, but I can't locate it now. Ideas?

Hi Peter, good to see you're around, once in a while.

As to your post, how about this ALA article?

cya

I don't know a page about the spaces around the dash, but I agree with you. In fact, I tend to do space-endash-space. It's probably typographically wrong, but I like how it looks. Emdash is a little long in the tooth.

Frederiek, yes, I'd seen that page a bit earlier today. All it says is that you can't rely on an OK display of thin (or thinner) spaces. It's silent about the question of regular spaces versus no spaces. I think I had in mind some elaboration of what Charles Poynton writes here.

My understanding is that the American style guides tend to prefer emdash with no space, and that European style guides tend to prefer endash with spaces before and after.

Anyway, back to the question of adding small space around an emdash... Have you considered putting the emdash entity into a SPAN, and adding padding/margin to the span?

Aha! Interesting. That explains why I don't like emdash. They say the dash is supposed to lead the eye forward. Emdash has the opposite effect on me. It stands out too much, makes me halt. Now I understand that's because I'm not used to it.

Ewwww! Now that truly is a grotesque expenditure of bytes. Well, I might do it if I needed an elegant dash within H1 or similar; but repeatedly, in running text? I'd rather not.

Pandy, I think that Micro$oft's subcontractors may agree with you. Perhaps it's because they disliked the looooong em dash that the designers of Trebuchet MS (and others, I think) made the em dash hardly any longer than a hyphen. This is OK if it's spaced. But when it's not spaced, well, you get results looking like "George Bush-who survived a pretzel-may be done in by Iraq."

Hmm... I like Trebuchet MS and use it as my default font, but I hadn't noticed this, so I took a look. The endash is just a hair wider than a hyphen, but the emdash is significantly wider than both.

Looking closer, an emdash seems to be about 3/4 of an em. The endash and the hyphen seem to be about 1/3 of an em. All of these include space: a row of adjacent characters doesn't quite connect into a continuous line. The main difference between the endash and the hyphen is that the hyphen is about twice as thick as the endash.

Interesting...

The distinction between en and em dashes is valuable, and supported by most of the major US and UK style manuals, which favour no spaces around em dashes.

I hope that the web browsers that don't render em dashes with spaces correctly will evolve to do so. What to do in the meantime is a difficult issue.

Tony, you want to use em dashes and don't seem to like spaces around them. This I understand. (I don't fully agree, but this is by the way.) However, you continue:



I don't quite follow this remark.

(If you'd said you hoped that browsers other than Safari broke lines before or after em dashes, I'd understand.)