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Comments on Should we render double hyphen as an em dash?

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Should we render double hyphen as an em dash?

+2
−2

Some places render "--" (double hyphen) as "—" (em dash).

Currently Codidact does not -- so these are left as double hyphens in both the edit preview and a rendered post (like that).

Would it be useful for Codidact to automatically render double hyphen as an em dash? Are there settings in which that would be a problem? When explaining command line flags such as --verbose I'd expect the double hyphens to be inside a code block. Would only rendering as an em dash outside of code blocks be sufficient to avoid problems?

I'm not sure if this is feasible yet. I just wanted to judge community interest in the idea first.

Workaround

In the meantime, if you want your post to contain an em dash, you can use "&mdash;" which renders correctly as "—". Putting it inside a code block allows displaying the raw text as &mdash; rather than —.

Note that it's "mdash" rather than "emdash" - &emdash; won't work.

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1 comment thread

Word is horrible with this - don't do it here! (3 comments)
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+7
−0

For the reasons you already alluded to, rendering -- as em-dash by default is dangerous, see discussions on a Similarly Engineered site. This is particularly true in question titles since they don't support formatting options.

I think that at least in communities where verbatim reproduction can be paramount for correctly stating questions and answers, automatic conversions should be avoided as much as possible. This is true all the more since

  • a new user will often not know how to protect -- using code tags, making questions prone to misinterpretation (considering that a majority of questions likely come from "first-time" visitors)
  • an inclined user who wants "typographically" fancy appearance can still explicitly enter e.g. an em-dash using the workardound you already mentioned, or by unicode code-point, i.e. Alt+0151
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1 comment thread

Questioners won't always know to use backticks (2 comments)
Questioners won't always know to use backticks
trichoplax‭ wrote over 1 year ago

The post you link to discusses questions, rather than answers, which makes me realize what I was overlooking:

An answerer will generally put -- inside a code block or inline code, so it won't get converted, but someone asking a question is less likely to know to do this, so we can't rely on it.

I was leaning in favour of automatically converting to em dash, but you've changed my mind with this.

AdminBee‭ wrote over 1 year ago · edited over 1 year ago

Yes, I think this summarizes the key issue rather nicely. I have edited the answer to highlight that aspect more prominently (so that future readers have it all "at a glance").