Notices by ankur sethi is alive and well (s3thi@fantastic.earth)

i know you usually don't put spaces around em dashes, but typographically they look SO MUCH BETTER to me when they're all spaced out properly.

maybe it's a print vs. digital thing? i'm okay with em dashes being stuck together with the actual words when i read something on paper, but the same thing irritates me on screen.

@samebchase there's only one person who can say for sure. paging @matratype.

@matratype @samebchase not sure which one is "correct" here. are there rules like this for print? or is that also "it depends"?

@matratype @samebchase looks like all style guides except the AP ask you to omit spaces around the em dash 🤷🏽♀️

also, i just realized that putting spaces around the em dash can affect how the text is soft-wrapped on narrow viewports.

i did some testing. browsers seem to not care about this at all, treating the em dash like any other punctuation. doesn't matter whether you add spaces around them or not, the result is the same. native macOS apps (Pages etc.) don't care either.

in all these apps, two words with an em dash in between are placed on different lines when the viewport is too narrow to fit all of them. the dash can stick to the first word or the second, based on available space. spaces don't make a difference.

Microsoft Word seems to treat two words joined by an em dash as a single unit. when wrapping text, it always keeps them together on a single line. but if you put spaces around the em dash, it behaves like any other browser/macOS app.

@abnv @pratul @nemo i've actually been thinking it would be a great idea to do a little workshop for people who want to migrate to Mastodon from other platforms. help people pick servers, give them tips on how to find content, help explain what federation means, stuff like that.

could be fun, and also serve my selfish need for wanting more people from India on Mastodon 😅