Sorry the double-dash didn't show up right, it is basically space hyphen hyphen space.

When you see the double dash in a manuscript you should change it to an em dash.

Or are you talking about online? As in the first paragraph of this article I was just reading. Because I think people use "--" when they don't know the HTML for an en (&ndash) or em (&mdash) dash?

Oh, and just to let you know, this question should have been posted in the General Discussions forum, not the Type ID or Crit ones.

It's not for online. It's for print materials. Yeah you're right. Should've put it in General Disscussion. thanks.

that's what I did. I changed them all back since i didn't want to start a fight with the copywriter... THANKS!

Copywriter Schmopywriter. That would've been a fight worth having. :)

> the HTML for an en (&ndash) or em (&mdash) dash

Just a point for reference. Both the entities mentioned above need a semicolon at the end. An entity without the semicolon works in IE, and perhaps in other browsers, but is incorrect and may not work correctly in all cases. An entity is defined as starting with the ampersand and ending with a semicolon.

It's one of those things that is used a lot online that probably has become a habit on paper. It's not traditionally correct, but perhaps the influence of online habits changes things.

To be fair, the em and en dashes are typographic luxuries, and not everybody is aware that they have more characters available to them than what is immediately aparrent on the keyboard. A double hyphen is acceptable when all you have is a typewriter, and somewhat forgivable when using a monospace font as one often does for email, but an em dash should be substituted when it becomes available.

For more on proper dash usage, see this discussion:
http://typophile.com/node/30372

Actually this sort of question belongs in the DESIGN area. :^)

If you were on an old-fashion typewriter (manual or electric) and you needed to type a 1-M dash for your manuscript -- you did not have an M-dash to use. So it became common practice for the typist to use two hyphens to show the extreme pause.

However, when this same document made it the "professional" typeshop, it was automatically changed to the 1-M dash it was meant to be.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

Also, don't forget one line under a word or sentence was for emphasis - the typewriter could do that fine...but they didn't have the italic counterpart that the "professional" used.

There are lots of instances from typewriter to typesetting we can go through just like this.