Re: [Groff] Re: Hyphens and Dashes

[Bernhard Fisseni]

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
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