Re: [Groff] Hyphens and Dashes

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

At 07:49 p.m. 30/03/2004, Andrew J. Piziali wrote:
>    Since we do have some professional typesetters in this community,
> perhaps you might offer some advise on the proper length hyphen (or
> dash) to use for an interjected phrase in a sentence.  For example,
> "I might state -- for the sake of emphasis -- that I am also annoyed by
> the proliferation of spam messages."  What is the proper length "--" to
> use in formatted output?  I have been using the -ms "\*-" character,
> somewhat long, but definitely sets the phrase apart.  I could also use
> "\-" (a bit shorter) or "-" (shorter still, a true hyphen).


Andy,

I'm no professional typographer, more the amateur and lover-of-the-craft 
kind, but I do have a few observations of my own.

The use of the hyphen is a matter of taste and typographic tradition. You 
should consult an authoritative source, which in the case of the US is the 
Chicago Manual of Style (lacking a better standardized source). In my copy 
it indicates that the proper hyphen in those cases is the em-dash (u2014). 
Yet, if you think it is too long, you could use a three-quarter dash 
(u2015). Typography standards are defined by cultural tradition, and as 
such they exist to be bent, broken and discarded, as far as the end result 
is artistically pleasing ;-). If you live in England (or a country of the 
Commonwealth) the traditions are different and you should consult other 
reference work (preferably edited at Oxford :-).

Typographical tradition changes from country to country *and* from age to 
age: change has become so fast that what was valid in the middle of last 
century is not anymore. To give you an example: the typesetting of quotes 
in Spanish, as that is what is closer to home in my particular case. Since 
the times of the French Farnesio family becoming rulers of Spain in the 
early XIX Century (the Borbón family, present Spanish ruling dynasty), 
perhaps earlier, the use of quotes has followed the French tradition. That 
is, quotes are the gillemets (« and », Unicode u00AB and u00BB). Yet, with 
the advent of desktop computing technology you'll find that in American 
Spanish speaking countries, *and* in Spain(!!!), most people just use 
"English typographical quotes" (meaning the "US ASCII typographic quote" 
which is what I am using here --- Unicode u0022.) If using some "smart" 
WYSIWYHYMG[1] word processing package, it will probably use English 
"typographer quotes", u201C and u201D and you can't change it easily --- 
with the exception of OpenOffice.org, btw. Thus, it is very difficult to 
find any book written in Spanish and edited and published in the last 20 
years that has correct typographical use of quotes, because most people 
around these here parts use MS-Word (the joke!) to prepare final copy for 
the printers.

[1] What you see is what you hope you might get.


Alejandro López-Valencia
http://dradul.tripod.com/
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
                                    (L. Wittgenstein)