For games I have a PC, but for doing any real work I have a Mac. Often I need to use an em-dash (a.k.a. m-dash, amp;mdash; ). It's a super-long hyphen that's supposed to be as wide as a letter m. Editors use it for reasons I don't quite comprehend.
On a Mac an em-dash is easy, you hit Option-Shift-Hyphen. I say it's easy. Mostly it's considered easy because it's well known. Macs are what you use if you want to do graphics or page layout work so it's easy to find out how to make special symbols on a Mac. But, what if you're trying to do the same thing on a Windows platform? Until today I'd wondered but been glad I didn't have to deal with it. Recently, the Colonel asked one of the editors how to make an em-dash. The editor didn't know. She'd abandoned her PC years ago for a machine that worked. So the Colonel came to me. I said "I don't know, but give me 5 minutes."
There are two answers in Word.
1) If your auto-correct is properly configured you can hit Space-Hyphen-Hyphen-Space and it will get converted for you.
2) You can also hold Ctrl and Alt then press the Minus Sign on the number pad.
Outside of Word:
3) Hold down Alt and type 0151.
In HTML:
4) —
5) —
6) —
2 comments:
Yes, Word corrects it automatically. You can also do a global replace on hyphens and convert them all to the em-dash.
But first you need to be able to type an em-dash in order to tell Word what to replace the hyphen with.
The Colonel's Word didn't have auto-correct set to replace the double hyphen.
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