⇥ Typography you can use
One of the downsides of working in the publishing business is that, after a relatively short amount of time, one loses the ability to enjoy reading the way normal people do.
This is not to mean that I no longer like to read—quite the contrary—but that I no longer can read any text on any medium without paying attention to its typographical design. Conversations between my partners and I usually start with “did you read that book?” and end up in some variation of “yes, the font was awesome—but they clearly haven’t mastered a good justification algorithm yet.”
On the web, most people don’t seem to know what to make of basic typography. In an effort to improve the general state of things, let me introduce you to three typographical elements that I use more often than, it seems, most other people: the endash, the emdash and the ellipsis.
Endashes and emdashes (also called en-dashes and em-dashes) are closely related cousins of the comma and semicolon. An endash (so called because it is roughly the width of the glyph n) is used to indicate a range. For example:php|architect, Volumes I–IV
The use of an endash, as opposed to the simple dash, is useful because it’s less likely that an automated process reading through a piece of text will confuse a range for a subtraction. This may seem trivial until you find yourself in the position of having to parse large quantities of text for the purpose of, say, compiling a book. It’s happened to me once, and I’ve been a proponent of endashes ever since.
On OSX, the endash can be produced by typing ⌥ + – (that’s Option-minus sign).
The emdash (whose name derives from the fact that it’s roughly the width of the glyph m) is (primarily—it also has other uses) a distant cousin of the comma. You can use it to indicate a portion of text that would normally belong between parentheses—in fact, it was once described to me as somewhere between a comma and a parenthetical remark. Think of the emdash as one more weapon in your grammatical arsenal—it’s less ambiguous than a comma (which, after all, could be used for a number of different reasons). It provides a considerable amount of separation between the two words that surround it—thus giving your eyes a visual queue that a new remark is being introduced.
The setting of an emdash—that is, whether it should be surrounded by a space (open setting) or not (closed setting), is a matter of much debate. I have a personal preference for closed setting, because I like how an emdash visually links two words while actually providing separation in the thread of a sentence.
On OSX, an emdash is produced by typing ⌥ + ⇧ + – (that’s Option-Shift-minus sign).
Finally, the ellipsis is a glyph that most people are familiar with—they just don’t use it properly. An ellipsis is a series of three small dots that either identifies an omission in the text or an aposiopesis (that is, an unfinished sentence). For example, I could use an ellipsis as such:If I only had a few million dollars to spare…
Most people, as I mentioned, create an ellipsis using three periods. This is wrong. Please, please, stop doing that. Periods have a number of uses, but producing an ellipsis is not one of them—unless, of course, you’re stuck in 1947 and your keyboard goes “clackety-clack” when you type. In that case, you have my sympathies.
Jokes aside, there are a number of good reasons why you should learn to use the proper ellipsis glyps instead of three periods. First of all, it’s typographically correct—most likely, your font glyps have been properly calibrated so that the individual marks of the ellipsis are the correct size (which is probably not the same size as a period) and are at the proper distance (which is definitely not the same as the distance between three periods). Additionally, you provide a valuable clue to any piece of software tasked with analyzing your text. Finally, you save two characters—which is very handy in today’s Twitter world.
On OSX, you can produce an ellipsis by typing ⌥ + ; (that’s Option-semicolon).
There you have it—three important typographical elements that will make your text more articulate. Of course, the rules for their usage are all but set in stone—there are plenty of conflicting schools of thought on the use of endash vs. emdash, for example (heck, there are conflicting schools of thought on how they should be called, let alone used), but the use of proper typography is an excellent device to force you to think more closely about your writing habits—especially your grammar.
Of course, such discussions never centre around our own products, which are, by definition, perfect.
Comments
How do you do it on a Windows machine? Gnome-Linux?
Sorry, I don’t use either with regularity, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you—although I’m sure you can program hotkeys in both OSes. Perhaps someone who actually uses them can pitch in?
Ctrl+Shift+U in Gnome, then type the number of the character.
In Gnome you can also bind the compose key—mine is bound to Right Alt—which enables you to use special characters without having to remember the “number of the character”. Google should be able to tell you how to bind the compose key.
The keystrokes are
Right Alt + – - . (that’s Right Alt-minus-minus-period),
Right Alt + – - – (that’s Right Alt-minus-minus-minus), and
Right Alt + . . (that’s Right Alt-period-period).
Great post, learned something new today that I can start applying right away.
But my first thought after reading it was not how to do this in windows or linux, but how do I do this in html, well I've looked it up:
… for ellipsis …
and
— for emdash —
Johann: my only comment there would be—with UTF-8, why bother with entities?
Are closed em/n-dashes treated as one or two words by search engines? I would assume the closed nature would make it appear as a single word unless the spider is setup to specifically handle them. Also, em/n-dashes and ellipsis are often not parse correctly by WYSIWYG editors and non-compliant page encodings. Would you still suggest switching to these elements for generic site text?
Any well-built parser will recognize properly-formatted punctuation—including emdashes and endashes.
I use a WYSIWYG editor for this blog, and it works fine as far as I can tell—although YMMV, it’s possibly best to simply try out specific instances to see how they react.
Windows doesn’t seem to have keystrokes for those (apart from using Alt+unicode# that is)
MS Word has (Right)Alt+. For elipsis though… At least on mine keyboard layout, which is non-standard (but fairly close).
In regards to using entities vs utf-8 characters, MS-Word and friends like to use reserved ASCII characters for em/en/elip instead of the proper utf-8 codes (see WinLatin1251 and cry). Pasting those characters from Word into HTML is a source of constant frustration for developers. Search for “Smart Quotes HTML” and you’ll see. Even shiflett has an article on how to deal with them.
Josh: I see. I don’t use MSW, so I haven’t encountered that problem—oddly, though, none of my clients has reported it either… perhaps it’s now been corrected?