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Should we render double hyphen as an em dash?
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 "—" which renders correctly as "—". Putting it inside a code block allows displaying the raw text as — rather than —.
Note that it's "mdash" rather than "emdash" - &emdash; won't work.
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No. If you want an em dash, you can use the HTML entity as you stated or just use the Unicode character. People who really want an em dash have figured out what they need to do to get it. People who use -- for em dash are presumably used to and fine with it being rendered as "--". Everyone else, which I expect to be the more common case, would just be caught off guard by this leading to confusion and frustration.
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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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