Not sure whether this has already been addressed, I assume it has?
Under Preferences, in the German version of Scrivener, there is the option to automatically replace double-minus (- -) by em-dashes (—). Yet en-dashes ( – ) are the correct ones, see the article on different kinds of dashes (German). Em-dashes don’t exist in German written language (aside some rare exceptions, perhaps).
My workaround it to use the replacement table and un-tick the dash replacement, which works fine. Yet for the German version, the option to enable en-dashes instead of em-dashes would be fitting.Of course, this is a really minor issue.
I’m not sure if this handled by Scrivener (the toggle is, of course) or macOS, but if it’s Scrivener it would be nice to have a choice. I like my dashes em.
(Also, you can hit ⌥- to type n-dashes directly, as a workaround.)
On a German keyboard, isn’t it just AltGr+Hyphen for en-dash? It is the same for English, but our hyphen key is in a different place. I wouldn’t call that a workaround though, that’s how you type the character, like how typing P is Shift+p. It’s a simple as that and just as fast to type in as any other letter or symbol once you do it for a while. Then again, people use auto-capitalisation to avoid the shift key, so I guess even P is a workaround to some!
That aside, I think what you’re doing: turning the dash option off, and handling it purely with Substitutions is a fine approach. The substitution feature gives you maximum flexibility, and thus takes the place of many hundreds of different hypothetical checkboxes, for different languages and standards. If I were one to use typography while writing, I would use the same approach myself, because I have always used --- for em-dash and -- for en-dash. There is plenty of valid use for both in English, but only one commonly gets replaced. We could add a checkbox for that too, but again I think it’s best to just recognise there is a general-use flexible system for making all of the shortcuts you’d could ever want or think up.
Absolutely! I also use Scrivs Replacement Table to produce typographically correct apostrophes as well.
On a side note, AltGr + - should work (as it does with OpenOffice or MS Word), but not with Scrivener; at least not here (Win10, Scriv 1.9). I only get regular hyphens there.
I’ll soon upgrade to Sriv 3.x, so let’s see whether the (very minor) issue is still there.