From: Andrei Rybak Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2023 18:52:16 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] Documentation: render dash correctly Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On 23/01/2023 12:04, Martin Ågren wrote: > On Mon, 23 Jan 2023 at 10:01, Andrei Rybak wrote: > >> highlighted with a `$` sign; if you are trying to recreate these >> -example by hand, do not cut and paste them---they are there >> +example by hand, do not cut and paste them--they are there >> primarily to highlight extra whitespace at the end of some lines. > > OK, so this is one of the new ones compared to v1. I can see the > argument for adding some spaces around the "--" for consistency and to > make this a bit easier to read in the resulting manpage (which can of > course be very subjective), but then I can also see that kind of change There are some less subjective guidelines. Asciidoc turns "--" into an em-dash.[1] In English, em-dash is almost always not surrounded by spaces (it is in French, for example), while en-dash is spaced in English when used instead of an em-dash.[2][3][4] This means that it's all the other places that use " -- " with spaces that are incorrect. References: 1. https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/syntax-quick-reference/#text-replacements 2. English Wikipedia is clear about its usage of en- and em-dashes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Dashes 3. Chicago Manual of Style FAQ doesn't spell out the spacing, but it's clear from examples: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0002.html 4. More confirmation on English Language and Usage Q&A website on Stack Exchange network: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/154998/54197 > being left out as orthogonal to this patch. Indeed, correcting spacing around dashes is orthogonal. Also, it might not be very desirable to have so much churn for spacing issues. > This v2 patch looks good to me. Thank you for review. > Martin