Re: [Groff] Re: Hyphens and Dashes

[Bernhard Fisseni]

Hi Alejandro,
hi list (though I might be a bit late and off-topic),

Scripsit Alejandro López-Valencia die 02/04/2004 (06:19 -0500):
> At 01:48 a.m. 02/04/2004, Bernhard Fisseni wrote:
> 
> >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).
> 
> Considering the Duden is as thick as a full edition of the Bible. One rule 
> and then 460 exceptions... :-)

That's the part on spelling; the part on typesetting is about eight
pages in my edition from 1984.

> >> Javier Bezos, his web site http://perso.wanadoo.es/jbezos/, particularly
> >> http://perso.wanadoo.es/jbezos/typo.html.
> >
> >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...).
> 
> But do notice that the rule is different: <space><em dash><nobreak>incerpt 
> text<nobreak><em dash><optional space if no punctuation>.

I didn't notice - thanks for making me aware of that.

> BTW, the en dash and the 3/4 dash are foreign to Spanish, so we get by with 
> the dash and the hyphen (and we do just fine, thank you very much). As well 

So if we ever have to divide a character set amoung us, you get the em
dashes and we keep the en dashes, however we'd have to split the
hyphens.  (Or maybe we should split the en dashes so that we both get
full-sized hyphens?)

> the use of & as abbreviation for "and" is an Anglicism; "and" in Spanish is 
> "y", could it get any shorter? The use of & as a replacement for "and" is 
> etymologically incorrect anyway. I believe that is the case in German as 
> well?

That depends on the interpretation of '&'; I think it has ceased to be a
ligature and means something similar to 'and'/'und'/'y'/'et',...
However, in German 'proper' use is to employ it only in firm names, not
as a general abbreviation for 'und', for that we use 'u.' (obviously,
this doen't help much in typewriting ;-).

> On the matter of quoting I forgot to mention previously that the "English 
> typographer quotes" fulfill in Spanish the role of the single quotes in 
> English: «El dijo, ``¡Fandango!''» (ISO-8859-1 doesn't have those little 
Single quotes in American (i.e. inner quotes), not British use (outer
quotes?), if I understand you correctly?

> pesky quotes).

quoting in different languages is nearly as in different programming
language -- though, for a sigle natural language, it's usually easier
than for half a *N*X shell. (Although German comes close, maybe, with
the use of several pairs of pairs of quotation marks, »><« in many
books, „,`“ [the outer quotes are the inner quotes doubled, for the
inner quotes I used latin1 equivalents], «<>» in Switzerland and “‘’” in
older MS Word / newer WordPerfect, "''" in ASCII/typewriting, ,, , ' "
in ASCII texts by foreigners/groff[?] ;-).)

> > 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.
> 
> I don`t think so either. I often wonder if the first US typesetters were so 
Interesting: I meant to indicate serious doubt here as someone told me
it was only accidental (which I found hard to believe); I admit my
sentence was obviously ambiguous.  (And expressing doubt inequivocably
in a foreign language has been shown to be very difficult, anyway.)

> eager to differentiate themselves from the "old country" that if the lived 
> today, they would be piercing their eye-lids.

But that's very practical, as you can still read with your eyes closed!?

Cheers,
Bernhard

-- 
Bernhard Fisseni
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