<a href="http://alistapart.com/stories/emen/" source="A List Apart" title="The Trouble With EM 'n EN (and Other Shady Characters)">The Trouble With EM 'n EN...</a> discusses how to create proper punctuation characters in online documents---specifically HTML. Of most interest are the rules of use for "em" and "en" dashes: <dl dt_class="field"> em dash <bq>...used to indicate a sudden break in thought, a parenthetical statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead of a colon or semicolon to link clauses.</bq> en dash <bq>used to indicate a range of just about anything with numbers ... also used instead of the word "to" or a hyphen to indicate a connection between things ... (such as the New York--Boston commuter train) ... [or] used to hyphenate compounds of compounds, where at least one pair is already hyphenated (as in 'Netscape 6.1 is an Open-Source--based browser.')</bq> </dl> The article also includes rules for all the different hyphens, quotes and spaces available (15 space characters in all!). Though these characters are all found in Unicode, most are not defined in HTML and there isn't much else to say or do about them when typesetting in HTML. More interesting is the section on quotes, which gives the decimal codes for curly quote characters as well as rules for using them properly. The <q> tag, though defined since early versions of HTML, still doesn't work reliably in any modern browser. Browsers that support CSS-added content may set up rules to generate the correct quote characters when needed (not supported in IE 6 or 7). Even the oft-misused ellipses character gets the full treatment: in most cases, it should accompany a full stop (period) character and placement depends on the intent being conveyed. <h>The earthli Munger</h> Text formatting at earthli<fn> supports automatic conversion for both en- and em-dashes, as well as the ellipses character, since version 2.7.1 released earlier this year. Automatic replacement of single and double-quote characters is not yet supported, but may follow in a subsequent release as a reliable algorithm has recently been published at <a href="http://www.pensee.com/dunham/smartQuotes.html">Smart Quotes</a>. The algorithm there is 20 years old and was first implemented on the Macintosh and implemented in old stand-bys like WriteNow. It's a bit smarter than that found in more modern word processors in that it avoids converting to curly quotes when inch or feet marks were intended. <ft>See <a href="http://earthli.com/software/webcore/docs/public/webcore/text/HTML_MUNGER.html">HTML_MUNGER</a> in the <a href="http://earthli.com/software/webcore/docs/public/">documentation</a> for more details</ft>