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I don't strictly oppose this typographical tradition; my native tongue has many widths of spaces (in particular between a measurement and the unit there should be a slightly narrower space) and I'm used to it.

What I dislike strongly is this idea that one should alter the source manuscript to emulate these typographical conventions. It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces. They are in no way equivalent!



> It makes no sense to replace a wider sentence space with two regular spaces.

Using a double space is a simple way of telling the computer that you want a wider space, because otherwise it can't tell that you mean the end of a sentence.


Similar to the spacing convention, we use two hyphens to signify an en dash and three for an em dash.


Three hyphens is a lot. I would have said it was more common to just use one hyphen for what should properly be an en-dash (which most people don't use) and two hyphens for an em-dash with or without spaces to separate from the surrounding words.


> we use two hyphens to signify an en dash

That depends on whether this functions as a poor man's input method (e.g. like in LibreOffice Writer), or is to be mentally applied by the reader.

The former is a very agreeable solution, the latter provokes flaming.


I can't recall ever seeing three hyphens used to signify an em dash in a document published on the net. (I added the word "published" to account for the possibility of the existence of a markup language I am unaware of that employs your three-hyphen convention.) I am fastidious enough about usage that I probably would've noticed and remembered.

In my experience, its always two hyphens (or space, hyphen, hyphen, space).


LaTeX converts three hyphens into an em-dash.




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