Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 07/26] Escape ASCII hyphen-minus characters used as such.

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Branden,

On Tue, 12 Jul 2022 09:40:52 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2018-06-20T11:33:25+0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > 247:following syntax - colon (:) separated list of elements, each
> > being of  
> 
> The foregoing should probably be an em dash.  In *roff you can obtain it
> with the special character escape sequence '\(em'.  My understanding of
> good English style would also not put spaces around it.

Your understanding is correct, according to man-pages(7):

   Em-dashes
       The way to write an em-dash—the glyph that appears at either end
       of this subphrase—in *roff is with the macro "\(em".  (On an
       ASCII terminal, an em-dash typically renders as two hyphens, but
       in other typographical contexts it renders as a long dash.)  Em-
       dashes should be written without surrounding spaces.

That being said, I don't like that personally, I find it hard to read.
It creates a long block which, if the rendering processor isn't allowed
to split it, may then require hyphenation, making readability even
worse.

So if we are going to fix it, I think I'd rather rephrase the paragraph
in a way that does not require an em-dash in the first place.

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support