<story><title>Hyphens in man pages</title><url>https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00083.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wolverine876</author><text>For those interested, I had to learn this stuff and following are the usual suspects in these typographical crimes, in English:&lt;p&gt;* U+002D: Hyphen-minus &amp;quot;-&amp;quot;: The old ASCII character that appears when you press the key on your keyboard, at least on a US keyboard. Per Unicode, &amp;quot;used generically for hyphen, minus sign or en dash&amp;quot;. Recall that ASCII had only ~96 &amp;#x27;codepoints&amp;#x27;, as we now call them, available for characters, so many characters were designed for multiple uses, such as quotes, used for open and close quotes; carot &amp;#x27;^&amp;#x27;, tilde &amp;#x27;~&amp;#x27;, etc. used also as diacritics; and the uber-flexible hyphen-minus-en dash (and unofficially em dash, half-em dash (&amp;#x27;--&amp;#x27;), and univeral horizontal line). Also, recall that typewriters only had one hyphen-dash-minus character.&lt;p&gt;* U+2010: Hyphen: &amp;quot;‐&amp;quot;: Specifically a hyphen and nothing else. Typographically, hyphens are just a bit shorter than en dashes. Grammatically, a hyphen demarcates a boundary within a term, such as compound words (&amp;#x27;editor‐in‐chief&amp;#x27;), phone numbers (555‐555‐5555), etc.&lt;p&gt;* U+2013: En dash: &amp;quot;–&amp;quot;: Typographically, half an em dash, slightly longer than a hyphen. Grammatically, en dashes show a continuous range, e.g.: &amp;#x27;October–December&amp;#x27;, &amp;#x27;pages 15–93&amp;#x27;, and, if I don&amp;#x27;t misunderstand, &amp;#x27;London–Paris train&amp;#x27;, etc. It&amp;#x27;s also used in some grammatical and typographical edge case circumstances. Also, of interest only on HN: &amp;quot;typographers sometimes use U+2013 en dash to represent the minus sign, particularly a unary minus&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;* U+2014: Em Dash &amp;quot;—&amp;quot;: Typographically, twice the length of an en dash, reputedly the width of a capital &amp;#x27;M&amp;#x27;. Grammatically, em dashes show a break: &amp;#x27;&amp;quot;No, no, not the—&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Yes—the Spanish Inquisition!&amp;quot;)&amp;#x27;. Also commonly used for parenthetical-style breaks in sentences: &amp;#x27;The Spanish Inquisition—ubiquitous, omniscient, or so they say—was always unexpected.&amp;#x27; Finally, used for attribution: &amp;#x27;&amp;quot;The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.&amp;quot; — Eisenhower&amp;#x27;. Also some odd, edge case uses. And because you asked, &amp;quot;In older mathematical typography, U+2014 em dash may also used to indicate a binary minus sign.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;* U+2212: Minus sign: &amp;quot;−&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;There are many more—Double Oblique Hyphen anyone? Search around Unicode, for example, for &amp;#x27;dash&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Sources: Unicode documentation, Chicago Manual of Style, maybe other similar sources. The summaries of their functions, based on those sources, are mine.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hyphens in man pages</title><url>https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00083.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wrs</author><text>See also blogs where double hyphens in shell script examples have been automatically converted to em-dashes, and source code rendered in a monospaced font with monospaced ligatures like “ﬂ”. The latter not only fails copy&amp;#x2F;paste, it’s a typographical tragedy. Even &lt;i&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/i&gt; does it, in a printed magazine with supposedly professional designers!</text></comment>