> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
It's funny that they omit to mention the possibility of setting it off with a thin space ' ' or hair space ' ' (those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me), which I thought was preferred typographic practice.
(On Googling, maybe the reason that they don't mention it is that I was imagining it; I can't find any evidence for my belief.)
> those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me
Interestingly, at least in my browser and grabbing the direct link to the comment with curl, show the bytes as 0x20 for both. Perhaps the comment submission handler, or even the browser, collated your more specific U+2009 (thin) and U+200A (hair) spaces into the regular U+0020 space?
> Interestingly, at least in my browser and grabbing the direct link to the comment with curl, show the bytes as 0x20 for both. Perhaps the comment submission handler, or even the browser, collated your more specific U+2009 (thin) and U+200A (hair) spaces into the regular U+0020 space?
Probably! I think HN strips out emoji; maybe it just takes the safest approach and strips out all non-white-listed Unicode.
It's funny that they omit to mention the possibility of setting it off with a thin space ' ' or hair space ' ' (those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me), which I thought was preferred typographic practice.
(On Googling, maybe the reason that they don't mention it is that I was imagining it; I can't find any evidence for my belief.)