From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Tue Jan 26 2010 - 14:31:15 CST
Michael Everson wrote:
> Normally one just uses two or three —— and ——— and kerns if there is
> any incidental space between them.
By “kerning,” you mean manual tuning of spacing between characters, not the
automatic kerning that rendering software may perform when a font contains
kerning information for character pairs.
Well, I don’t do kerning on your message, where I clearly see dashes
separated by a small amount of empty space. Actually, most people have no
idea of kerning, automatic or manual.
Maybe the lack of 2-em and 3-em dashes as characters in Unicode is based on
the assumption that successive em dashes are joining, either because they
have been so designed by the font designer (i.e. the advance width is
exactly the same as the dash width), or because automatic kerning is
specified and used. But these assumptions often fail.
This may be related to the American (U.S.) practice of using an em dash for
punctuation so that there is spacing between it and adjacent letters. This
had led to font design where em dash has no intrinsic spacing on left or on
right, so consecutive em dashes form a continuous line. However, some
typographers have started favoring a design where the em dash has some
intrinsic spacing, so that it does not hit adjacent characters.
James Felici writes in “The Complete Manual of Typography”: “Fonts that do
offer punctuating em dashes typically include kerning values that draw them
together when dashes are set consecutively, allowing them to be used as
joining em rules.” But this is too optimistic. There are many situations
where kerning is not applied, or even cannot be applied. (Word processors
normally don’t do kerning for copy text, and web browsers haven’t done any
kerning, though Firefox seems to have some poorly documented or undocumented
kerning features.)
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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