this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Apologies, this is a rant. Please ignore if you are an em dash fan and know that I am not ranting at you, but at its creator.
As someone who has had to deal with comparing text output via automated tests, this thread hurts. I hate Em Dashes and whoever invented them with a burning passion. They make text comparison a nightmare.
"Let's invent a character that looks exactly like a slightly longer hyphen, but isn't!" Brilliant. Well done.
Why not just make the hyphen longer instead so people can just type it, like they do with every other character? Nope, instead, let's invent a different character that can only be typed if you know the Unicode ID.
Even worse is the fact that there are also En Dashes. Because we definitely needed both and couldn't just type multiple consecutive hyphens to make the line longer...
The worst part is that if you are writing physically, and you're not a robot, there is no way to distinguish between these at all; they are all just hyphens.
I just use HTML entities to type en and em dashes. — -> — – -> –
Oh nice Lemmy supports these entities.
On Typst its
--The character was created specifically because when we write we use different length dashes to mean different things—subtraction through to a pause for thinking.
The automated test will have no difficulty telling them apart. Are you saying it’s hard looking at the results of this tests? You might need to use a font that makes that easy (I agree many monospaced fonts don’t, but that’s not the character’s fault. Or include a step that replaces en with 2 hyphens and em with 3.