(Untitled)

[bovlb]

Why do people insist on jamming emdashes into adjacent words? Unlike the hyphen or endash, they're intended to separate not join. Omitting the space looks ugly and causes unnecessary confusion.

Update: I find this particularly irritating when I'm reading aloud (especially in a dim light, when I'm tired, or when I'm concentrating on the audience

Comments

[nickbarnes]

I like it like that.

[gareth_rees]

Because it's been the practice of good typesetters-for hundreds of years-to set em-dashes without spaces.

[gjm11]

I think the rationale is probably that an em-dash is very long already, and that space+emdash+space produces too big a separation between the material on either side.

(Bringhurst's "The elements of typographic style" suggests that the em-dash is too big a separation even without spacing on either side. His preference, like mine, is for an en-dash with spaces.)

[gareth_rees]

Modern typographic practice is rather impoverished in regard to dashes when compared to the past masters of the art:

[gareth_rees]

Incidentally, Google books search allows us to follow declining standards in editing and printing as the work travels. The image above is from a 1769 printing of the first edition of Tristram Shandy, designed by Sterne himself.

An 1813 edition, printed by William Durell, Boston, looked like this. The editor has speckled the page with extra punctuation like a bird fouling its nest.

[nickbarnes]

The later editions all have the same additional punctuation marks, which suggests either that each is working from the first such or that they are all working from some single source. Adding a punctuation mark beforea long dash (I can't bring myself to call these em-dashes) seems deeply wrong to my modern eyes.

[gareth_rees]

It seems wrong to me too, but note that the full stop after "hand" is in the original.

[aldabra]

Mmmm. I use en-dashes with spaces, and to hell with typographical tradition.

[gareth_rees]

En-dashes with spaces are traditional too.