First, forgive me if I’m not using the correct terminology. I’m currently editing a manuscript, and starting to notice little differences between what I’ve imported from another word processor, and what I’ve written in Scrivener. The first to strike me was that my old word processor converted two dashes to an en-dash, and scrivener converts to an em-dash. Now I notice that ellipsis seem to look different. The scrivener converted ellipsis is wider. Which is correct? And are there any other similar issues I need to watch out for?
This will eventually be formatted for an e-book, so getting the formatting correct is important to me (e.g. I won’t be relying on a copy-editor to fix little bugs and inconsistencies).
I can’t comment on the width of ellipses, but I think Scrivener’s conversion of – to an em dash makes more sense than conversion to an en dash. En dashes are used primarily with numbers, not words. According to the Chicago Manual of Style, the main exception is this: “The en dash can be used in place of a hyphen in a compound adjective when one of its elements consists of an open compound or when both elements consist of hyphenated compounds… Whereas a hyphen joins exactly two words, the en dash is intended to signal a link across more than two. Because this editorial nicety will almost certainly go unnoticed by the majority of readers, it should be used sparingly, when a more elegant solution is unavailable.” The Chicago Manual is an excellent arbiter of such things; you can sign up for a trial 30-day subscription.
So you may (unless you are dealing with numbers) need to do a global change of en dash em dash.
The ellipses character is determined by the font, some may be wider than others, but most seem to be a little narrower than three actual terminal dots in a row. What character was your previous word processor using for ellipses? There is only one baseline horizontal ellipsis character (…) in the Unicode table. But maybe it was using some other type of punctuation entirely as a matter of preference?
As for the en/em-dash stuff posted above, yeah that’s my understanding of best practices as well. The best guideline I’ve come across for deciding which to use is to think of the en-dash as being syntax for the word “through”—for example, in cases like “June 12–14”.
Thanks all! And I agree with the replacing en-dashes with em-dashes. I guess I was also asking if anyone had addition experiences with formatting quirks for a new user to look for.