Re: [Groff] Re: Hyphens and Dashes

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

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... :-)

> > 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>.

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 
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?

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 
pesky quotes).

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


--
Alejandro López-Valencia
http://dradul.tripod.com/
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
                                    (L. Wittgenstein)