Multilingual Typesetting Note: Proper Use of Dashes

What do you think of this typesetting?

No problem for Japanese people with this guide board. Foreigners who rely on station numbering may be momentarily confused. There is room for improvement in this layout, but where and how should it be corrected?

Table of Contents

Negative Points

Improvement Plan

Dash when expressing range or duration

Other than English

Dash when cutting the flow of text

Bullet Points

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Negative Points

Improvement Plan

Dash when expressing range or duration

When expressing a range of dates, times, locations, numbers, etc., use an en dash (–U+2013) without spaces. The en dash is slightly longer than a hyphen and has a different role, so it must be distinguished. Even if a different symbol is used in the original text, it is necessary to replace it with the correct dash when typesetting.

Other examples:

1 Tilde (~) is a Japanese symbol and is not used in Western languages.

2 Is it a remnant of the typewriter era to put spaces before and after the hyphen?

3 This is also a remnant of the typewriter era, but using two hyphens will result in a replacement with an em dash, causing a double mistake.

4 An em dash is a symbol that serves a different purpose. In English, an em dash is not used in this context.

These are all inappropriate and should be replaced with en-dashes. Connecting multiple elements with hyphens makes them one unit, but connecting with en-dashes makes it clear that they are separate entities.

5 If a foreigner unfamiliar with Tokyo sees this, they may not be able to tell if it is a long-named station called "Shinjuku Nakano-Sakaue" or if it is three stations between "Shinjuku" and "Nakano" and "Sakaue". By displaying it as a suggestion, it will be clear that it is between Shinjuku and Nakano-Sakaue.

6 Just like names, when connected with a hyphen, it becomes a disease name named after one person, Kreutzfeldt-Jakob, and when connected with an en dash, it becomes a disease name named after two people, Kreutzfeldt and Jakob. Of course, the latter is correct.

In reality, even if numbers or place names are connected by some sort of horizontal bar, I think they can be inferred in context, but there is still room for misunderstanding. If symbols are used accurately, "cohesion" and "distance" can be distinguished at a glance, and there will be no room for misunderstanding. Just by considering typesetting a little, the way it is conveyed will change.

Other than English

English and other Western languages generally use the same en dash as English, but there are also languages that do not. Instead of arbitrarily unifying with English, use appropriate symbols for each language. Japanese often uses a wave dash, but it is not uncommon to use a full-width dash (—) or an en dash (–).

In Russian, the distinction between dashes seems to be ambiguous, and the most commonly seen is the em dash (with spaces before and after), but there are also cases where the hyphen or en dash is used. This is not limited to Russian, as there are often languages where the rules for typesetting are not clear, or even if there are rules, they are not strict and the correct usage is not clear. In these cases, it is best to simply unify the usage within a single project.

Dash when cutting the flow of text

Use dashes when you want to pause or break the flow of a sentence. The usage is either em dash (–U+2014) without spaces before and after, or en dash with spaces before and after, which is more common.

Bullet Points

Bulleted lists are often created using bullets (•), but you can also use en dashes. Sometimes you may see lists using hyphens, but they are not very noticeable, so I recommend using en dashes which are easier to recognize at a glance.