xkcd #3126: Disclaimer

Title text:

You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

Transcript:

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3126/

explainxkcd for #3126

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[–] hallettj@leminal.space 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

In typography there are three distinct lengths of dash-like symbols:

em dashes are as long as the letter "m" is wide
en dashes match the width of the letter "n"
hyphen is the shortest, and is the symbol on standard keyboard layouts.

Traditionally em dashes are used for punctuation—such as to separate clauses where the second clause expands on the first.

En dashes are used for ranges, like 1–7, or to join words or phrases together.

Hyphens are used within words, such as to indicate compound-words.

I think people were more particular about these uses when using typewriters. Like you could type two hyphens, and that would get you the same length as an em dash, and would look like one continuous symbol.

Nowadays the hyphen is the only easy dash to type, and it doesn't look like one continuous line when typed twice. So instead of using an em dash people often use a hyphen with spaces around it, and people tend to use hyphens for ranges too. But ChatGPT knows the typography rules, and it likes to be technically correct.

I'll note that I've just found that on Android you can get em or en dashes pretty easily by showing symbols, and then doing a long-press on the hyphen symbol.

———

Not written by ChatGPT, I'm just like this

[–] tarknassus@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

Crap I’ve been doing it wrong. I just use a regular hyphen - like this…

[–] wischi@programming.dev 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Nowadays the hyphen is the only easy dadh to type

That's not true in general. I personally use the German Extended (E1) layout (when I'm not on mobile) and the em dash is super easy to type. There are also lots of other custom layouts used by people who care about typesetting.

Even people that don't internationally care about typesetting sometimes use them because their tool (like Word and some CMS systems) automatically replace hyphens in specific places with em dashes, or substitute straight double quotes with the correct quotation marks (depending on which country you are from)

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

And on macOS, you can usually get an en dash with option dash and em dash with shift option dash

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 5 points 5 days ago

I care more about typesetting than the average feller, but LaTeX lets you use three hyphens (---) to form an em-dash. Didn't know any layouts had a key/chord for 'em.