Re: [Tools-discuss] [Cellar] non-ascii characters (fwd) Dave Rice: non-ascii characters

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 30, 2019, at 09:39, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> I’m not aware of an opportunity for that (well, maybe except for the choice between en-dashes and em-dashes for the punctuation mark in the form of a horizontal line used to indicate a pause, to delimit an inserted sentence or phrase, or to indicate a deliberately omitted word).    But given that this is the IETF, I’m sure we’ll find one :-)
> 
> AFAIR, there are also different opinions about whether there should be
> whitespace around it.

Right.

Traditional German: em-dash with whitespace
“Modern” German: en-dash with whitespace
Traditional US English: em-dash without whitespace, or sometimes with (AP style, i.e., news)
Traditional UK English: it’s complicated
Today’s English: hodgepodge
Laypeople: essentially, use dashes only where Microsoft Word turns a hyphen into a dash automatically, and that involves typing spaces, or so

(And, of course, there are range and versus dashes as well, which are always en-dashes, but might incomprehensibly have whitespace in English.)

I don’t have my CMOS with me, or I would cite chapter and verse.
But the important observation is that this is a well-known editorial style issue to which a copy-editor should have an answer.

More generally speaking, the fact that Unicode has more characters does not mean we need to spend a lot of time deciding which character to use.  I think we are also old enough to no longer fall into Unicode traps (e.g., Ω vs. Ω).

Grüße, Carsten