![]() This pages gives a glimpse of how absurdly complex digital font characters are: Which one would you like me to use as a minus sign?” If an editor told me my minus sign was too skinny, I’d print a page with every ANSI, UTF, Windows or ASCII character that resembles a minus symbol and say “here are 14 sorts of dashes and hyphens plus a bunch of minus signs and other symbols. No point losing sleep over a 1-pixel difference in the width of 3 different minus signs, I say. Oh-I’ll bet you can’t see a character on the 3rd line above, because so few fonts have a character for ASCII number 173. Three hyphens in one character set, and they’re all different and/or not included in all fonts. For example, some ASCII/html symbol charts list… This stuff gets more complicated the more closely you look at it. The missing one in that sequence, 2011, isn’t represented in the ‘standard’ or ‘normal’ font set, for that code, as far as I can see. MaBy Mister Punctual Filed Under: Hyphen, M-dash, N-dash, Punctuation On Your Phone Tagged With: minus sign, minus symbol, subtraction symbol Reader InteractionsĪccording to MS Word, 2210 is a hyphen, 2012 is a dash, 2013 is an en dash, 2014 is em dash. Quickly insert an n-dash or m-dash in Microsoft Word Insert an n-dash or m-dash on a web page or blog When to use the hyphen, dash, n-dash and m-dash Note that the hyphen is a bit lower-down on the line of text than the minus sign and the dashes, plus it is very short – it looks too low and too small when used in mathematical expressions. ![]() But in the WordPress editor the minus sign looks 50% longer than the n-dash! This probably illustrates software inconsistencies – which might suggest it is pointless to obsess about the pixel-level differences between the various options for Unicode minus signs. On my PC in Chrome or Firefox, the minus sign looks a wee bit shorter than the n-dash. I’ve viewed this page on some tablets where, in the table above, the symbols all look the same. Please note: These characters are rendered very differently on different devices. Here’s how: The minus sign is slightly thinner and has a sliver of space between itself and the adjacent characters. Only an obsessive typography freak could tell whether you used a minus sign or an N-dash. It would be very hard to pick the right symbol from the map, but in the field ‘character code’ you can enter a code that finds the right one… Symbol This opens a tool showing all of the characters for every font on your computer. Go to ‘insert’ / ‘symbol’ / ‘more symbols’. ![]() If you want to insert a ‘proper’ minus sign in Word, here’s how: To look closely at the differences, use ‘Ctrl’ and spin your mouse wheel to zoom in/out on most browsers, or just zoom in with your fingers on a tablet. Unicode (the standard for electronically encoding text information) has separate codes for the minus sign, hyphen and N-dash. A reader asked about the difference between a minus symbol and an N-dash (thanks Tem). ![]()
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