Font-rendering question.

Blaze Miskulin
(@blazemiskulin)

19 years, 1 month ago

I’ve been using WP for a while now, and I like it, but there’s one little thing that annoys me, and I’m not sure if it’s something in WP, in the CSS, or somewhere else. I use a double dash quite often in my sentences. It represents an aside or a tangent.

However, when typing a double dash–as I frequently do–something in the program translates it to an “em-dash”–a single dash of (supposedly) longer length. However, it’s *not* longer. It’s virtually impossible to differentiate from an “en-dash” (a hyphen). I want the double-dash, not the em-dash.

Any clues?

Version: WP 1.5 (though this was a problem in older versions, too)
character encoding: UTF-8
font-family: ‘Arial’, Verdana, sans-serif;

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

xmarcos
(@xmarcos)

19 years, 1 month ago

If you have te Markdown and/or textile active, turn them off they always change your code.

sleep
(@sleep)

19 years, 1 month ago

Arial doesn’t seem to have an en or em dash. (at least on my mac version) only the hyphen.

It’s virtually impossible to differentiate from an “en-dash” (a hyphen).

hyphen – (concatenation…pro-create)

en dash – (series…2000–2005)

em dash — (a harder break than a comma but less than a period)

three types, all different.

Thread Starter Blaze Miskulin
(@blazemiskulin)

19 years, 1 month ago

Sleep: I’m aware of the difference. However, a keyboard doesn’t have an en-dash or em-dash, it only has a hyphen, and others may not know what they are.

The double-dash is an accepted alternative for the em-dash, and in virtually all common usage, the hyphen is used in place of the en-dash. And the hyphens in my posts actually look like an en-dash (longer than a hyphen).

My dilema is that something is changing my hyphens into something else. I want it to stop. 🙁

xmarcos: I don’t have either of those plug-ins activated. I don’t have any plug-ins active, actually. I also tried turning off the emoticons (just on a whim) and that didn’t affect it, either.

vkaryl
(@vkaryl)

19 years, 1 month ago

You could add a class to your CSS to make the double-hyphen the length you prefer – but then you’d have to “span-class” every time you wanted to use it. Unless there’s a way to include it in the “html, body”…. I’ll have to play with it a bit, never thought about it….

Thread Starter Blaze Miskulin
(@blazemiskulin)

19 years, 1 month ago

Fixed!

I posted this question in another forum, and a friend happened to be really bored this morning and decided to dig through the code. 🙂

The culprit is the “functions-formatting.php” file:

the em-dash:
$curl = str_replace('--', '& # 8211 ;', $curl);

the elipsis (another punctuation that I tend to abuse)
$curl = str_replace('...', '& # 8230 ;', $curl);

I deleted those two lines, and it’s the way I want it now.

Kafkaesqui
(@kafkaesqui)

19 years, 1 month ago

You could also turn off the formatting by commenting out the wptexturize ‘add_filter’ lines in wp-includes/default-filters.php, or through a plugin…

http://www.coffee2code.com/archives/2004/06/27/plugin-wpuntexturize/
(Doesn’t hit en and em dashes, but they could be added to it.)

http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/TextControl

sleep
(@sleep)

19 years, 1 month ago

delete or comment out line 14 of functions-formatting.php

$curl = str_replace('--', '–', $curl);

might do the trick…

Took too long to post :^)