Hyphens vs dashes (em-dash, en-dash)

Previously: 220201-1625 German Bindestrich VS Minus

Theory

Hyphen vs. Dash–What’s the Difference? | Grammarly is the source for what follows.

• Hyphen for book-loving student: connecting two one-word entities
  • ‘dog-friendly hotel’, but ’this hotel is dog friendly’: hyphen only if the compound modifier comes before a noun ([[231201-1401 How to read and write a paper according to hackernews]]’s writing guide calls this “used as an adjective”)
  • take a five- or ten-minute break
• en-dash –, width of a letter N, is a super-hyphen with extra glue for connecting entities that may be more than one word:
  • pre–World War II buildings
  • formally - for time/page-number/score ranges
• an em-dash (width of an uppercase M) is more artistic than technical. It’s a pause in a sentence, more than comma but less than semicolon or period. No rules about spacing around it as long as it’s consistent
  • for surprising information instead of
    • parentheses
    • explanatory or amplifying information
  • sudden interruption, especially in dialogue
  • two hyphens -- may get replaced by an em-dash in most programs (including TG)
• Fazit: the hard part in typography in en-vs-hyphen, creating an am-dash is trivial but it’s the less useful of all of them
• Maybe it’s my Ukrainian grammar interference, but I use it a lot in my sentence structure, especially in what maps to “explanatory or amplifying information”

Inserting them into things

How to make a long “-” in Markdown, i.e. the character “–”? - Stack Overflow for markdown

as unicode

- 
–
—

HTML entities

Minus Symbol    −    −
En-Dash         –    –
Em-Dash         —    —

Smartypants

Markdown postprocessor, quoting documentation quoted in SO:

SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:

Straight quotes ( " and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities
Backticks-style quotes (``like this'') into “curly” quote HTML entities
Dashes (“--” and “---”) into en- and em-dash entities
Three consecutive dots (“...”) into an ellipsis entity
This means you can write, edit, and save your posts using plain old ASCII straight quotes, plain dashes, and plain dots, but your published posts (and final HTML output) will appear with smart quotes, em-dashes, and proper ellipses.

Let’s try:

• Smartypants: not in Hugo it seems ``curly’’, –, —, …
• HTML always works:
  • minus-from-my-keyboard: -
  • minus HTML: −
  • n:–
  • m:—

LaTeX

Surprisingly simple:

Hyphen: -
En-dash: -- /  \textendash
Em-dash: --- / \textemdash

Remaining questions

• Terminology;
• minus from my keyboard (-) vs − (−) vs hyphen (?) vs dash (?)
• The UniSearcher: Character Block 02000 - 020FF has 6 different dashes but oh well

Commitment (lol)

I’ll try to use all these correctly in all my written speech from now on because why not.