Subj : Re: Christian Fellowship To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Thu Sep 26 2024 13:50:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > > >The double hyphen (--) is > > translated to a long hyphen by LibreOffice. > KM> Actually, no. It's not translated into an m-dash, as one would > KM> expect, but into an n-dash, used by absolutely no one for > KM> absolutely nothing. > > (Who would have thought a discussion of dashes outside of running!) It's a mad dash for the word processor! > I sort of recall the 'm-dash', not an 'n-dash' -- and only heard of the > m-dash in the past few years. Something I haven't (yet) incorporated > into my vocabulary. I knew m-dash (emdash) first, myself. N-dash of course comes after. > > KM> Another weirdness is that the -- to n-dash only works if there's > KM> a space to either side, which is fine for some things but not how > KM> book publishing wants it. > > (So how does book publishing desire?) I do the space-dash-dash-space > thing: to me looks better and conveys the usage. A dash (meaning I prefer space-dash-dash-space as well (unless at the end of a sentence), not only looks better but doesn't lead to long strings that don't linebreak gracefully. BUT... this does not translate well into ebook formats, which are XML in a wrapper. You get extra spaces on one end and it looks stupid. You can use a nonbreaking space but then you get different problems. So for final formatting, all the -- become--shrunk. > hyphen) without a space (to me) implies the word is hyphenated: as in > 'non-stop'. A space-hyphen-space implies a brief pause, semi-colon-ish, > but a semi-colon is a hare longer and attaches two similar and sort of > continuous thoughts whereas the hyphen is sort of like a pause for a > inhalation. A proper m-dash is long enough that it's obviously NOT a hyphen. However, some word processors and some fonts mangle them all to the same length, at least in the display. RoughDraft does that, so I don't use m-dash until final formatting (Wordpad, then Calibre). > > (Wonder how I'm doing? A non-technical English speaker trying to > descibe punctuation to someone who is well-versed in it!) Oh, wait til you see German or Spanish punctuation.... > KM> The problem is that there's no real standard for m-dash (there > KM> are three different codes in RTF, and gods know how LibreOffice's > KM> XML handles it), however there is a standard for n-dash. So > KM> that's what it uses, unless you paste in a proper m-dash or have > KM> it assigned as a special character. It may be *calling* an > KM> m-dash, but it is an n-dash. (About a third to half shorter than > KM> an m-dash, but about double the length of a hyphen.) > > I would half-guess if someone like a programmer were to select a > punctuation mark he would slect the one with a standard behind it, so > the folks at LibreOffice accidentally selected the wrong dash style. It was more "anything that is RTF is Microsoft, therefore we will not support it." And yes it was that stupid. It's WHY there is no real RTF editor for linux. Well, there's one sort of but it hasn't been updated in about 12 years, and wasn't very good to start with. NO, the mess LibreOffice and the like make of RTF export doesn't count. (Includes all the printing and layout codes and screws up ebook formatting, so has to be manually stripped anyway, which is a PITA if you don't have a very old HTML convertor to deal with it. We're talking 1995, and it's a Microsoft tool, so... back to the same stupid objection.) > KM> In fact now that I think of it, I need to see if I can change the > KM> autocorrect so it'll give me a proper m-dash. Or make it 3 > KM> hyphens. > > Three hyphens means a tadline is coming up! Two mean end of message! > LibreOffice (and so probably other word processors) has a search-and- > replace function: ^H. (You're welcome Mike!) Yeah, they put it somewhere nonstandard. > > KM> Otherwise I have to keep another document open, with a real > KM> m-dash, that I can copy and paste from as needed. > > You are going to figure out that auto-correct real soon: all that manual > copy/paste will get old and hand-crampy quickly! Tiresome, but necessary.... > .. Avoid commas, that are not necessary. ... "Bones! I! have! finally! learned! punctuation!!" þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com (454:1/1) .