Em dash
The em dash (-) in typography is a horizontal bar that is an em long. It is used as an indent and in tables, as well as an indent in various languages such as English and Spanish . Other horizontal dashes are the minus sign , the quarter-quadruple , the half-quadruple and the double quadruple, and the hyphen-minus .
use
The very long em dash is often perceived as annoying, as its use leaves rather large holes in a text due to its length. It is hardly used in German .
As a dash it serves to separate individual elements of a list from one another. Sometimes it is placed after the decimal point (25, - €) for even currency amounts , since in most fonts a zero - in special fonts for table typesetting all digits - is (about) a half square wide. Typographically correct for the running set the use of would be here but half square stroke . In tables with price information, however, the em dash is allowed to replace two zeros (4, - €). The em dash can also be used to identify fields without an entry in a table or form. In addition, it is often used in lists to save repetitive words, i.e. as an underpass mark.
Dash in English
In traditional English typesetting , the em dash is also used as a dash , but without enclosing spaces or just enclosed by “ hair spaces ” in order to keep the resulting gap in the text small ( the fire drill — it was chaos ) . However, this tradition is not undisputed in modern English typesetting; Instead, the half-quarter dash with surrounding spaces is used today, as is used in German typesetting (What did you say - he doesn't want to come until tomorrow?) .
Representation on computer systems
The em dash is contained in the Unicode block General Punctuation at position U + 2014 (8212 10 ) under the name EM DASH and in the character set Windows-1252 at position 151 (97 16 ). It can be entered in various systems using key combinations or codes:
| System (u) | Em dash (-) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U + 2014 | ||
| DIN standard keyboard layouts (m) E1 and T2 |
Alt Gr+4 | ||
|
Windows - assignments |
n. v. | ||
| Alt+0151 | |||
| macOS occupancy | ⌥+ ⇧Shift+- | ||
| Linux , Unix, etc. with X11 etc. |
Alt Gr+ ⇧Shift+ -or Compose, -, -,- |
||
| Neo keyboard layout | ⇧Shift+- | ||
| LibreOffice (a) u. Ä. | k. A. | ||
|
Microsoft Word (a) |
Strg+ Alt+- | ||
| 2, 0, 1, 4, Alt+C | |||
| Vim | Strg+ K, -, ⇧Shift+M | ||
| Strg+ V, U, 2, 0, 1,4 | |||
| TeX / LaTeX |
---or \textemdash(LaTeX only)
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HTML - / XML - entity |
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--) that are not surrounded by spaces.See also
- Minus sign with a table of similar characters (horizontal bars) in Unicode
Individual evidence
- ↑ OpenOffice.org Wiki - Text Lines
- ↑ Automatic formatting of hyphens as dashes and em dashes ( memento of the original from March 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Karl Pentzlin: German PC keyboard extended for international correspondence . In: DIN-Mitteilungen 2/2011, p. 31 ff.
