Comment by oniony
I cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.
I cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.
Em dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities   and   These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks:
: ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – —
“ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ < ≤ £ $ ¢ € ‹ « √ μ # @ + = ÷ - – —
1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space
Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.
That depends on the language — whereas German puts spaces around —, English afaik usually doesn’t.
Similarly, French puts spaces before and after ? ! while English and German only put spaces afterwards.
[EDIT: I originally wrote that French treats . , ! ? specially. In reality, french only treats ? and ! specially.]
In English, typically em-dashes are set without spaces or with thin spaces when used to separate appositives/parentheticals (though that style isn't universal even in professional print, there are places that aet them open, and en-dashes set open can also be used in this role); when representating an interruption, they generally have no space before but frequently have space following. And other uses have other patterns.
> whereas in English it’s em-dashes without spaces
Didn't know! Woot, I win!
Why does AI have a preference for doing it differently?
french does "," and "." like the british and germans the rest is space befor space after
Technically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.