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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2241 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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em dash with no spaces is the traditional US standard for serious typography, now adopted by LLMs. en dash with spaces is the British standard. A dash which separates two thoughts and a parenthetic dash are set in the same way.

An en dash without spaces is used for ranges and sports scores in both the UK and the US, e.g. 3-6 months or a 2-0 defeat.

ASCII does not distinguish between hyphens, dashes, and minus signs, meaning that a hyphen with spaces became the online standard for dashes in the era when plain ASCII was what the internet ran on - hence the em dash becoming an LLM marker

LaTeX sets hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, minus sings representing negation, and minus signs representing subtraction as five different characters.

LaTeX sets hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, minus sings representing negation, and minus signs representing subtraction as five different characters.

Does it use different characters for negation vs subtraction? I thought it was the same character but with different kerning.

em dash with no spaces is the traditional US standard for serious typography, now adopted by LLMs. en dash with spaces is the British standard.

This is a gross overgeneralization, judging from a few books grabbed from my shelves and websites visited.

  • Steve Jackson Games (Austin, 1970s–present): En dash with spaces

  • New York Times (present): Em dash with spaces (cringe)

  • Sherlock Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): Em dash without spaces

  • Rumpole of the Bailey (London: Penguin, 1983): En dash with spaces

  • Reuters (London, present): Hyphen-minus with spaces (cringe)

  • Associated Press (New York, present): Em dash with spaces (cringe)

Every publisher does whatever it wants.

a hyphen with spaces became the online standard for dashes in the era when plain ASCII was what the internet ran on

You're forgetting about the double hyphen-minus.

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