Re: Display of em dashes in our documentation

[Daniel Brooks <db48x@db48x.net>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
>> In any monospace font, I certainly prefer this:
>> 
>>        When ‘recover-session’ is done, the files you’ve chosen to recover
>>     are present in Emacs buffers.  You should then save them.  Only
>>     this — saving them — updates the files themselves.
>> 
>> To this:
>> 
>>        When ‘recover-session’ is done, the files you’ve chosen to recover
>>     are present in Emacs buffers.  You should then save them.  Only
>>     this—saving them—updates the files themselves.
>
> But that's against our style of writing documents, isn't it?  I
> believe the usual US English style is not to leave whitespace around
> em dash.

I agree that there is no universally consistent style here, but that’s
only because half the world is demonstrably mad. In a monospaced font,
putting spaces around the dashes is the only thing that signals that
they aren’t being used as a hyphen. In a variable–pitch font then it is
probably fine not to put any spaces. But if you’re using an en dash in
this role instead, then spaces are probably necessary again. Personally
I prefer _not_ to use dashes of either width for this purpose;
semicolons are less ambiguous.

On the gripping hand, that particular sentence could easily be rewritten
to avoid the use of either. Might even be an improvement.

db48x