I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood the he had developed that masterwork of TeX to make his book, I immediately went to read it. There, in page four he writes:

I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood that he had developed that masterwork of TeX to make his book, I immediately went to read it. There, in page four he writes:

> Book printing diﬀers significantly from ordinary typing with respect to

> dashes, hyphens, and minus signs. In good math books, these symbols are all

> diﬀerent; in fact there usually are at least four diﬀerent symbols:

> a hyphen (-);

> an en-dash (–);

> an em-dash (—);

> a minus sign (−).

> Hyphens are used for compound words like ‘daughter-in-law’ and ‘X-rated’. En-

> dashes are used for number ranges like ‘pages 13–34’, and also in contexts like

> ‘exercise 1.2.6–52’. Em-dashes are used for punctuation in sentences—they are

> what we often call simply dashes. And minus signs are used in formulas. A

> conscientious user of T E X will be careful to distinguish these four usages, and

> here is how to do it:

> for a hyphen, type a hyphen (-);

> for an en-dash, type two hyphens (--);

> for an em-dash, type three hyphens (---);

> for a minus sign, type a hyphen in mathematics mode ($-$).

So I kept using the beautiful em dash ever since; because that is how the greats do it.

user:	pmkary
created:	April 4, 2017
karma:	413
about:	Pouya Kary — Kinda a researcher. archive.pouyakary.org