En (em) dashes and spaces

[jbidoret]

First of all, a huge thank you for this tool!

I had a rather specific question regarding French typography. Shoudn’t en dashes – when used as “parenthetical remark” (incises) – be typeset with narrow no break spaces (or non breaking spaces, depending the mood :), like with french quotes ?
In the above sentence: « Shoudn’t[space]en[space]dashes[space]–[narrow no break space]when ».

Sometimes, em dashes are also used to mark incises (and maybe should be treated equally).
Unlike parenthesis, or quotes, en or em dashes don’t necessarily come by pairs, which might harden the possibility to guess what to do, not even saying the character is the same of opening and ending.

If you have any thoughts on this…
Thanks in advance.

[damienalexandre]

Hi! Thanks for your kind words 💛

Looking at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponctuation#Espaces_et_ponctuation - it seams you have a good point:

	AVANT le signe		APRÈS le signe
trait d'union (quart-cadratin, différent du tiret) ce n’est pas une ponctuation mais un signe grammatical.	pas d’espace	-	pas d’espace
tiret (demi-cadratin)	espace fine ou espace (insécables)	–	espace fine ou espace (sécables)
tiret (demi-cadratin) lorsqu’utilisé en début d’incise	espace fine ou espace (sécables)	–	espace fine ou espace (insécables)
tiret long (ou cadratin)	espace fine ou espace (insécables)	—	espace fine ou espace (sécables)
tiret long (ou cadratin) lorsqu’utilisé en début d’incise	espace fine ou espace (sécables)	—	espace fine ou espace (insécables)

I did not found any other source.

That being said you are also right, we cannot programmatically distinguish incises...

Maybe we could insert narrow break space at least, instead of pure space 👍 What do you think?

[jbidoret]

Thanks for your quick reply!

A small check in my Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l’Imprimerie nationale; they don’t say that a nnbsp/nbsp should be used inside incises. According to the authors, a normal space should be used, but their words lack of precision.

Another source, Orthotypographie, Volume II, de G à Z (https://www.orthotypographie.fr/intros/telecharger.html, entry “Tirets”) provides a quite long debate (unresolved) around whether or not the spaces around dashes should be breakable or not…

In my own uses, and Wikipédia is almost ok with that, I find it necessary to “glue” the dash and the incise phrase, so that such a dash doesn’t end a line alone. Typography rulez…

Doing it my way would require a pair check (the closing character of the incise can be another dash, or a period) to guess on which side of the dash we should replace the space by nnbsp or nbsp. I don’t know how difficult this would be.

[damienalexandre]

We do "pair check" in the smart quote system already (distinction of the opening and the closing quote); so that should not be impossible 👍

PR are welcome if you wanna try working on this!

[jbidoret]

Sadly, I fear that I’m far from being able to do so, don’t understanding enough the structure of JoliTypo, and not being good enough in PHP.
(Adding up to the complexity, I even have another use for end dash : marking a range, as in “1978 – 1994” :)

[damienalexandre]

@jbidoret Hello 👋 What do you think about this attempt? #123

Thanks