Learn how to create, modify, and typeset en dashes (–), em dashes (—), and hyphens (-) in desktop publishing.
- The size of the en and em dashes is roughly equivalent to the width of the lowercase n and m, respectively, for the typeface in which they are used.
- En dashes (–) are primarily for showing duration or range as in 9:00–5:00 or 112–600 or March 15–31.
- Em dashes (—) are the proper dashes to use in place of single or double hyphens (--) as punctuation. Similar to a parenthetical phrase (like this) the em dash sets apart clauses in a sentence.
- Hyphens are for hyphenating words and to separate characters in a phone number (123-555-0123).
- Create en dashes with Option-hyphen (Mac) or ALT 0150 (Windows) — hold down the ALT key and type 0150 on the numeric keypad.
- Create em dashes with Shift-Option-hyphen (Mac) or ALT 0151 (Windows) — hold down the ALT key and type 0151 on the numeric keypad.
- Create en dashes in HTML with & #150; (ampersand-no space, pound sign 0150 semi-colon). Or, use the Unicode numeric entity of & #8211; (no spaces).
- Create em dashes in HTML with & #151; (ampersand-no space, pound sign 0151 semi-colon). Or, use the Unicode numeric entity of & #8212; (no spaces).
- Sometimes en dashes and em dashes for a typeface are too small, too large, or too poorly spaced to be visually pleasing. Manually reducing or kerning them can improve their appearance.
- Hyphens are usually shorter and thicker than the en dashes although it can vary by font and the difference may be hard to discern, depending on the font. - – —
