Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!jarthur!dave
From: dave@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Dave Stuit)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: em-dashes
Message-ID: <1640@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 15 Jul 89 21:13:01 GMT
References: <65741@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: dave@jarthur.UUCP (Dave Stuit)
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA
Lines: 50

In article <65741@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> leichter@CS.YALE.EDU (Jerry Leichter) writes:
>In any case, I mentioned in my posting that I had seen examples of typography
>with spaces around em-dashes, but that I couldn't name any off-hand.  Well, it
>turns out that I had an example sitting right beside me - but I didn't notice
>it until today.  Take a look at the New York Times.  It uses a significant
>amount of space around em-dashes.  It's difficult to tell exactly how much,
>but it looks very much like an inter-word space to me.

This illustrates a point someone brought up earlier -- that conventional
rules frequently are broken when there's a "good reason."  Newspaper
typography is one area in which this is the case.

The narrow columns used in newspapers make it difficult to enforce rigid
typesetting conventions without producing some really ugly-looking copy.
The problem, in many cases, is compounded by equipment that fails to do all
of the fine-tuning that a system such as TeX does.

(As a side note, I'll mention that TeX sucks at justifying text in narrow
columns.  Its unwillingness to allow minor imperfections in a paragraph
occasionally lead it to give up completely, producing absurd results.  I
know little about TeX, but several people who knew much more were unable to
fix this by monkeying with tolerances and such.  TeX may do a nice job on
full-width reports, but on narrow columns, it can't compare to a simple
line-by-line justifier (like troff).  Then again, maybe it just takes
someone with a Ph.D. in TeXography to get it to work right....)

Leaving spaces around an em-dash allows line breaks to be performed on
either side of the dash.  Also, when a line is stretched to perform full
justification, the spaces around the dash provide more places over which the
padding can be distributed.  This flexibility is necessitated by the
narrow-column format.  The Associated Press Stylebook says, "Put a space on
both sides of a dash in all uses except the start of a paragraph and sports
agate summaries."

I've always thought that the spaces made sense, because the dash is supposed
to break parts of a sentence, not tie together two adjacent words (like, for
example, a hyphen in a compound modifier).

On the matter of ellipses:  The Associated Press' convention is to treat an
ellipsis as a three-letter word.  However, an ellipsis may be preceded by a
period:  "If the words that precede an ellipsis constitute a gramatically
complete sentence, either in the original or in the condensation, place a
period at the end of the last word before the ellipsis.  Follow it with a
regular space and an ellipsis."

The newspapers do what works for them, and I'd advise you, the net.reader,
to do whatever works for you.  Just be consistent about it.  (Sorry for
taking so long to get to the point.)

--dave				dave@jarthur.claremont.edu  uunet!jarthur!dave