Blame Canada: Robert Bringhurst is Wrong

iMarcians care very much about doing their very best, whether it’s code, design, experience, or content. We argue—sometimes vociferously—about what, exactly, is best. Today's topic: Punctuation.

Let’s talk about dashes. There are many—see Your PC is not a typewriter for the full list. I’m interested in the use of dashes to denote an change in thought or direction, for example:

Many readers of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn consider the ending flawed—Hemingway, for example, said that Twain “cheated”—while others have praised it. (source)

You’ve got two choices, the en-dash and the em-dash.

Typographer Robert Bringhurst has exiled the em-dash, claiming it’s Victorian. However, other typographers disagree based on contemporary American usage. The Chicago Manual of Style prescribesthe unspaced em-dash, as does the Oxford Guide to Style, the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and most American book publishers.

For that matter, what about spaces between sentences? Bringhurst hates two spaces, also considering it Victorian. Yet Bringhurst’s history is sadly, demonstrably factually incorrect, as documented in Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history).

Spacing around the em-dash is a valid concern. Full spaces can really make words seem too far apart; typographers solved this problem centuries ago. Modern recommendations vary by style guide; most American, Austrialian, and some British guides recommend using hair spaces or simply setting them closed. Several major English publishers (including the prestigious Cambridge University Press) use a space, en-dash, space, and most Canadian style guides do as well. (Did I mention that Bringhurst is Canadian?) The spaced en-dash is the convention in German and French as well.

(The AP Style Guide ignores the matter entirely and shows its telegraph roots in prescribing a double hyphen instead. Oy gevalt.)

Here are samples of the spaced en-dash, the un-spaced em-dash, the spaced em-dash, and the hyphen, set in Georgia and as rendered by Safari 7… (I’ve borrowed and mangled content from DIY Leather Tassel Necklace, which I found because of the domain name. Ironically, she uses en-dashes instead of em-dashes.)

And that’s in a decently well-made font. Some font designers make, ah, questionable choices. For example, the Mac system font Lucida Grande, for no good reason, uses almost identical glyphs for the en-dash and hyphen, making the em-dash the only sane choice:

So, we can’t count upon commonly used fonts to have sane metrics (except for newer browsers which support @font-face—hooray for them!). But it gets worse.

The real trouble with “space en-dash space” is line breaks. Web browsers traditionally suffer from truly horrific typography. No line should begin with a dash of any sort, yet browsers will cheerfully honor a space for a break and push your en-dash to the next line:

Any good typographer would catch and fix this, but web browser engineers haven't yet noticed the problem.

(Let’s not even get into Microsoft Word’s autocorrect follies, other than to say it rarely honors the typeface you’ve selected and substitutes fonts without telling you.)

So now what?

The en-dash can’t be relied upon to look right, and it causes weird wrapping. The em-dash is right in every font I’ve examined, and it prevents browsers from doing horrible things.

Most British and Canadian publishers prefer the spaced en-dashes. Most American publishers and newspapers prefer the unspaced emdash.

We definitely don’t use French or German as our working language.

We’re an American company and our clients’ sites are overwhelmingly written in US English. We should use—nay, mandate!—the unspaced em-dash.

Or we could sidestep the debate entirely. Just put in a period and start a new sentence. It worked for Hemingway.