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Re: [Groff] Re: Hyphens and Dashes
From: |
Bernhard Fisseni |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] Re: Hyphens and Dashes |
Date: |
Fri, 2 Apr 2004 08:48:21 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.6i |
Hi Alejandro López-Valencia,
hi list,
Scripsit Alejandro López-Valencia die 01/04/2004 (19:06 -0500):
> At 05:25 p.m. 01/04/2004, Ted Harding wrote:
> >On 01-Apr-04 Jeff Conrad wrote:
> >
> >> I agree with Alejandro's recommendation of the Chicago Manual of
> >> Style as an authoritative guide to U.S. practice.
> >> [...]
> >> I'd use the Chicago Manual with caution outside of the U.S.,
>
> [snip]
>
> >For the UK you can hardly go wrong with "Hart's Rules for Compositors
> >and Readers at the University Press, Oxford".
>
> [snip]
>
> In what pertains to Spanish, the information is scattered here and there,
> but the authoritative source (and some of the recommendations are better
> than a Monty Python sketch ;-) is the "Ortografía de la Real Academia de
> la Lengua", available on-line from the R.A.E.'s web site
> (http://www.rae.es/) in PDF format.
For German, this used to be the rules for typography in Duden, which are
pretty short, though; it doesn't even mention the length of a dash,
although all examples have an en dash (or something similar).
> A person who has done an admirable effort to rescue traditional Spanish (as
> in Castilian and Catalonian) typography with computers is Javier Bezos, his
> paper on Spanish typesetting included with LaTeX's multilingual typesetting
> package Babel is recommended reading, as well as perusing the papers
> available at his web site http://perso.wanadoo.es/jbezos/, particularly
> http://perso.wanadoo.es/jbezos/typo.html. Everything in Spanish, of course.
Interesting: His text was the first non-American text in which I've
noticed the em-dash-without-space convention (checking on the only book
printed in Spain I own: it also follows this convention; I admit I
haven't read it far enough to see any dashes...). I've also found that
this conclusion can often be drawn symmetrically: a text that has en
dashes with space is usually non-American, even if it's in English. I'm
not sure whether that's a coincidence.
In German, dashes without space as punctuation are certainly wrong[1].
As a rule of thumb could probably be: the older the book, the longer the
dashes.
[1] Some people use hyphens with space for marking compound nouns, like
Zeichensetzungs-Regel 'punctuation rule', and as punctuation between
phrases, but this is wrong for both purposes. Word processors often
offer a function to more or less randomly replace a hyphen by a
dash, which a lot of people don't notice anyway.
Cheers,
Bernhard
--
Bernhard Fisseni
Dienst: Institut fuer Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik
Poppelsdorfer Allee 47 -- 53115 Bonn
privat: Steinweg 32 -- 53121 Bonn-Endenich, D