9 ms·

"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the

by eddyg 2mo ago

"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry." https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes

usui 2mo ago
I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.
- locknitpicker 2mo ago
  > I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.
  - pimlottc 2mo ago
    It’s can’t be any more difficult than getting people to agree on how many spaces to use for indentation…
adverbly 2mo ago
That is so stupid. Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large). Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power. The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.
- adregan 2mo ago
  I can’t tell if this is sarcasm. If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash. EDIT: Additionally, unicode primarily exists to encode the typographic symbols that exist—that is to say, it's a catalog of what already is. Take Ogham[1] for example. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)
- TehCorwiz 2mo ago
  Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old? Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents. So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters. Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!
  - palmotea 2mo ago
    > So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters. Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation. > Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out! No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#/media/File:United_States_Declaration_of_Independence.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_United_States,_page_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line) In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.
- eddyg 2mo ago
  How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52 https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52 I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.
  - DonHopkins 2mo ago
    I do miss the old PHP manuals on Hurricaine Electric with the comment sections where anyone could discuss every function, ask stupid questions, and post totally bogus answers, which everyone would then believe without skepticism, then copy and paste into their code in production. It was like pre-AI poor man's artisnal LLM hallucinations. There need to be chat discussions like that for every unicode character.
  - yreg 2mo ago
    Would like to see how this looked handwritten.
- moregrist 2mo ago
  Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references. This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_. It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US: > Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name. [0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0002.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
  - bee_rider 2mo ago
    Hmm, like in the References section for a paper? Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out (bibtex handles it more accurately that I could anyway). For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text. Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.
    - moregrist 2mo ago
      > Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied. > I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite. You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into. The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again. While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.
- rcxdude 2mo ago
  There's far more niche things in unicode, and I don't really see that much point getting angry over them.
  - adverbly 2mo ago
    I'm sorry but someone has to stand up for simplicity and to stop garbage from making its way into open public standards. The bar has to be set somewhere. How many people actually use this thing? We can't go introducing characters into standards just because six people with power want some claim to fame. I for one wasn't even aware that Unicode characters could be so large. Did they have to make a special exception for this or are there other characters that are that wide?
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - orimirs 2mo ago
      Check this out 𒐫
    - rcxdude 2mo ago
      I don't think they're adding these things for fame, I gotta say. And yeah, unicode characters can be pretty large. Again, this is isn't even the tip of the iceberg of unicode complexity or weirdness.
- ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
  >The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain. Counterpoint: the people who use tools the most should be the ones designign and creating them. All you have to do is continue not using it just like you did before it existed, but instead you insisted that its existence make sense to you as someone who doesn't need it and doesn't do what it's meant to help with.

by eddyg 2mo ago

usui 2mo ago

I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.

locknitpicker 2mo ago
> I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.
- pimlottc 2mo ago
  It’s can’t be any more difficult than getting people to agree on how many spaces to use for indentation…

adverbly 2mo ago

That is so stupid. Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large). Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power. The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.

adregan 2mo ago
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm. If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash. EDIT: Additionally, unicode primarily exists to encode the typographic symbols that exist—that is to say, it's a catalog of what already is. Take Ogham[1] for example. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)
TehCorwiz 2mo ago
Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old? Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents. So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters. Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!
- palmotea 2mo ago
  > So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters. Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation. > Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out! No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#/media/File:United_States_Declaration_of_Independence.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_United_States,_page_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line) In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.
eddyg 2mo ago
How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52 https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52 I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.
- DonHopkins 2mo ago
  I do miss the old PHP manuals on Hurricaine Electric with the comment sections where anyone could discuss every function, ask stupid questions, and post totally bogus answers, which everyone would then believe without skepticism, then copy and paste into their code in production. It was like pre-AI poor man's artisnal LLM hallucinations. There need to be chat discussions like that for every unicode character.
- yreg 2mo ago
  Would like to see how this looked handwritten.
moregrist 2mo ago
Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references. This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_. It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US: > Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name. [0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0002.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
- bee_rider 2mo ago
  Hmm, like in the References section for a paper? Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out (bibtex handles it more accurately that I could anyway). For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text. Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.
  - moregrist 2mo ago
    > Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied. > I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite. You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into. The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again. While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.
rcxdude 2mo ago
There's far more niche things in unicode, and I don't really see that much point getting angry over them.
- adverbly 2mo ago
  I'm sorry but someone has to stand up for simplicity and to stop garbage from making its way into open public standards. The bar has to be set somewhere. How many people actually use this thing? We can't go introducing characters into standards just because six people with power want some claim to fame. I for one wasn't even aware that Unicode characters could be so large. Did they have to make a special exception for this or are there other characters that are that wide?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - orimirs 2mo ago
    Check this out 𒐫
  - rcxdude 2mo ago
    I don't think they're adding these things for fame, I gotta say. And yeah, unicode characters can be pretty large. Again, this is isn't even the tip of the iceberg of unicode complexity or weirdness.
ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
>The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain. Counterpoint: the people who use tools the most should be the ones designign and creating them. All you have to do is continue not using it just like you did before it existed, but instead you insisted that its existence make sense to you as someone who doesn't need it and doesn't do what it's meant to help with.