> He lies buried in the corner of his churchyard, in the parish of ⸻, under a plain marble slab
If we were to use three em dashes in a row, the renderer typically puts a 1-2px gap between them. Using U+2E3B leaves no gaps.
Likewise, we use a 2-em dash, U+2E3A, for partially obscured words, for example this line from Gogol's short fiction:
> The town of B⸺ had become very lively since a cavalry regiment had taken up its quarters in it.
Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.
Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large).
Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power.
The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.
Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents.
So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.
Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!
Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation.
> Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!
No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line)
In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.
The bar has to be set somewhere. How many people actually use this thing? We can't go introducing characters into standards just because six people with power want some claim to fame.
I for one wasn't even aware that Unicode characters could be so large. Did they have to make a special exception for this or are there other characters that are that wide?
You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references.
This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_.
It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US:
> Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name.
[0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
That's not what I said or what I intended to imply.
I think it's stupid because It sounds like the thing that I would assume almost nobody encounters. Like so few people that this is not needed. If more than 10,000, people have ever typed this thing out for its intended purpose, I stand fully corrected.
The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards.
How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.
This isn't some some language that thousands of people speak. To me this seems like some weird thing that some drunk academic came up with and told his friends about.
Also, this thing is freaking huge. How many characters are this wide? Should the bar be higher to introduce obviously weird characters?
Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspect that this is much more of unicode trying to capture existing behavior, even if rare. And I think it's important to err on the side of capturing what people did, even if it's from an bygone era.
> How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.
It's definitely more than 10. But even if it's 10, I disagree with your assessment. People used this; it's worth a codepoint. There are far stranger code points out there.
And I've seen far weirder things in open standards. Have you read the C99 standard? Are you aware of the three allowed integer representations? Of which maybe two were in use in 1999, and one only in use in relic hardware that might exist in maybe tens of sites.
That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.
For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text.
Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.
As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied.
> I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant?
Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite.
You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into.
The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again.
While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.
If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash.
EDIT: Additionally, unicode primarily exists to encode the typographic symbols that exist—that is to say, it's a catalog of what already is. Take Ogham[1] for example.
I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.
It was like pre-AI poor man's artisnal LLM hallucinations.
There need to be chat discussions like that for every unicode character.
Counterpoint: the people who use tools the most should be the ones designign and creating them. All you have to do is continue not using it just like you did before it existed, but instead you insisted that its existence make sense to you as someone who doesn't need it and doesn't do what it's meant to help with.
However, when encoding them into Unicode, the consortium suddenly discovered the importance of being frugal with character IDs and only defined a single "Han" sequence of characters for all three scripts. You need to select a matching font to actually display the text in the script that's intended.
This makes using those characters an unnecessary hassle and also came over as a cultural faux-pas to some (essentially like encoding Greek Eta, Latin H and Cyrillic En as the same character, because they look similar and the scripts have a common history)
<s>It also looks a bit hypocritical when Unicode otherwise goes the opposite way and has the space to encode dozens of variants of the Latin alphabet or — as we see here — several categories of dashes.</s> (Edit: Han unification was done when Unicode was still 16 bit, so there were real space constraints — so no hypocrisy actually)
Really, they needed to come up with the idea of variation selectors way earlier, and use them aggressively. And design something more consistent for character composition, and skip the precomposed characters (those really are glyphs representing a cluster; being able to treat the cluster as an atomic entity versus its components doesn't add actual semantic information to the text).
They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape.
In German, nouns have gender, so why not more inclusive punctuation? The him dash, her dash, it dash, and the nonbinary them dash. It would really infuriate MAGA if you could apply emoji gender and skin color.
And of course if you really want to make a statement and stick it to those anti-AI em-dash nit-pickers, there's always the Zen-like struck-out no-break space (U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE + U+0336 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY) ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ you can combine them to any length!
It's a shame Hacker News filters out the really good ones, like the üm dash: — (U+2014 EM DASH + U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS) and the over-accentuated üm-á-ñå-ḍ-ç dash: — (EM DASH + DIAERESIS + ACUTE + TILDE + RING ABOVE + DOT BELOW + CEDILLA).
@dang I know @mentions don't work so you'll never read this, so screw you for filtering out my favorite glitchy punctuation diacritics, you jerk! I feel like my creativity is stifled and freedom of speech suppressed!
Triple emdash cannot be used as a lubricant. Do not touch, inhale, or look at triple emdash. Do not taunt triple emdash.