Sunday, June 10, 2007

A Very Small Peeve

Why doesn't Blogger do m-dashes? I often want to use one. After the semicolon, it's my favorite piece of puncuation.
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11 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 10, 2007 at 8:00 PM

    LOL -- Mine too; however, I believe I'd reverse the order.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJune 11, 2007 at 9:48 AM

    I know Word lets you hold down the Alt key and press the minus sign on the numeric keypad, but for blogger...

    Hold down the Alt key and type 196. When you let go of the Alt key you should see a dash (but not an emdash) slightly larger than a hyphen.
    ─ dash
    - hyphen

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  3. AnonymousJune 11, 2007 at 9:54 AM

    Love that "too special" one!

    How about "too sophisticated."

    and... There are 500 stories in here. Pick one and run with it, fool!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJune 11, 2007 at 10:02 AM

    Yikes!! How did this get here when I was in the 'editor speak.' Please delete and move cuz i can't. Grrr. Thanks!!

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  5. AnonymousJune 11, 2007 at 10:42 AM

    Sorry, in Word it's hold down Ctrl and press the numeric keypad minus sign (not Alt).

    And when you type '196' is must be on the numeric keypad.

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  6. AnonymousJune 11, 2007 at 1:47 PM

    Em dashes are spectacular. Semi-colons, on the other hand, don't do a thing for me. Ellipses--now those are truly loveable...

    Shelly

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  7. AnonymousJune 11, 2007 at 2:33 PM

    Semi-colons scare me. I know it is an irrational fear but they do nonetheless. I am always afraid I will misuse them so I just avoid them and phrase things differently.

    I've done way to much typography to care about dashes anymore(I'm sorry but it is true),but dots(some people call them ellipses) are the new pink for me....

    BTW, that is nice code above for dashes.

    Anyone know a code for moving responses to where they really should be?

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  8. JoshuaJune 11, 2007 at 8:22 PM

    You can also use the — HTML entity, like this—see?

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  9. Tristi PinkstonJune 13, 2007 at 2:02 PM

    I'm so glad to hear an editor say they love semicolons. I am getting tired of having them yanked out of all my manuscripts.

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  10. MJJune 15, 2007 at 3:18 PM

    I'm pretty sure Blogger will let you use the HTML character entity for an em dash—it's ampersand pound 8212 semicolon.

    I added it to the sentence above; if it worked, you should see an em dash.

    There are all sorts of other neat character entities here. Just in case you ever need to use a ™, a ç, or an œ ligature in Blogger. :-)

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  11. Editorial AnonymousJune 15, 2007 at 10:17 PM

    MJ—it worked! That's fabulous!

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