Non-Breaking Em-En dashes

[Dave \IT\]

I can't seem to get these to work. How am I supposed to be creating them?

 

[Eric Coffman]

Dave,

In Word, go to INSERT/SYMBOL.

Other than that, I can get it by clicking Start and then Run. Then, type
CHARMAP and press enter. This works for me on my Win2K PC but a friend of
mine said that it does not work for her.

Hope this helps.

Eric

 

[Martha]

I can't seem to get these to work. How am I supposed to be creating them?

Generally speaking, em and en dashes are supposed to break, and the
ones inserted by the built-in keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Num -, or
Alt+Num 0150) are the breaking kind. Unicode, however, does provide
non-breaking varieties. Depending on your font[1], there should at
least be a non-breaking em dash. Go to Insert-Symbol. On the Symbols
tab, select "General Punctuation" in the Subset dropdown on the right.
(The other dropdown should say "(normal text)".) Depending on the
font, there might be a whole bunch of horizontal-line–type characters,
or there may only be three or four. In any case, select the dash that
looks about the right length, but *doesn't* have a keyboard shortcut
set.

[1] Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Tahoma, and lots of others
provide a non-breaking em dash, but not a non-breaking en dash. Arial
Unicode MS and Lucida Sans Unicode have both em- and en- length
versions of the nonbreaking dash (although at least in the former, the
em doesn't look much longer than the en). Some fonts have neither
(Trebuchet) or get the glyphs wrong (Microsoft Sans Serif thinks the
non-breaking em dash is a superscript line).