I cannot remember ever reading a book where there was a space around the dashes.

▲ kuschku 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That depends on the language — whereas German puts spaces around —, English afaik usually doesn’t.

Similarly, French puts spaces before and after ? ! while English and German only put spaces afterwards.

[EDIT: I originally wrote that French treats . , ! ? specially. In reality, french only treats ? and ! specially.]

	▲	greenicon an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In German you use en-dashes with spaces, whereas in English it’s em-dashes without spaces. Some people dislike em-dashes in English though and use en-dashes with spaces as well.
	▲	iLoveOncall 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		French doesn't put one before the period.
	▲	bratwurst3000 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		french does "," and "." like the british and germans the rest is space befor space after

▲ LoganDark 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Technically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.

	▲	cachius 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Em dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities &hairsp; and   These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac... Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks: `: ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – —` And they usually add space to the right of these: `“ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ < ≤ £ $ ¢ € ‹ « √ μ # @ + = ÷ - – —` https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-sp... 1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.