You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B).

Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.

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acabal an hour ago | parent | next [-]

At Standard Ebooks we use the three-em-dash to indicate a fully obscured word, for example this line from Tristram Shandy:

> 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.

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eddyg 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry."

https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes

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adverbly 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is so stupid.

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.

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TehCorwiz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old?

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!

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moregrist an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.

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...

	▲	bee_rider 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Hmm, like in the References section for a paper? Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out (bibtex handles it more accurately that I could anyway). 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.

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adregan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

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.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)

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eddyg an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52

I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.

	▲	DonHopkins an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I do miss the old PHP manuals on Hurricaine Electric with the comment sections where anyone could discuss every function, ask stupid questions, and post totally bogus answers, which everyone would then believe without skepticism, then copy and paste into their code in production. It was like pre-AI poor man's artisnal LLM hallucinations. There need to be chat discussions like that for every unicode character.

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usui 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.

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locknitpicker 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it?

Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.

	▲	pimlottc 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It’s can’t be any more difficult than getting people to agree on how many spaces to use for indentation…

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applicative 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hadn't thought of it as named that way, but super long dash is a reality of ye olde typesetting, e.g. bibliographies with one author appearing many times, but named only with the first work, or in indexes where there are subordinate concepts etc.

Here's a googelensed bit of the index of a philosophical work from the thirties. The entries after 'Aristotle' are all megadashes, but google lens reads them as hyphens. Under 'Kant' the subheadings have subheadings so the typesetter doubles the triples up without however employing a six-em-dash

Activity, 34-6, 99, 157.

Actuality, 343-4, 348.

Aesthetic experience, 15, 156, 339, 346.

Anselm, 232, 233-4.

An sich, 46, 84.

Appetite, 252-3.

Aristotle, vi, 3, 26.

- Activity, 35, 157.

- Being, 33-4.

- Categories, 34.

- Cause, 149-50, 155, 249.

- Demonstration, 186, 209-10, 279, 282, 354.

- Division, 279.

– ἐπαγωγή, 212, 225-6.

...

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jerf 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You also shouldn't forget the Eminem dash: –—–. Recommended for use in censoring words in rap songs.

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ericyd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My heart bleeds for the monospace font developers who have to design this glyph.

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walkerbrown 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m curious, what is the objection to Han unification?

	▲	xg15 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Only know the discussion superficially, but from what I understood, the problem was as follows: Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja scripts have the same historical roots (Han) and still look very similar when you write them — however, they are fully separate scripts with different use of letters and optical differences that are important. 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) 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.

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DonHopkins 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Three-em dashes are multinational conglomerate punctuation.

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!