February 8, 2012

The difference between a dash and a minus sign

A reader asked about the difference between a minus symbol and an N-dash (thanks Tem).  I had to do a bit of homework on this. Unicode (the standard for electronically encoding text information) has separate encoding for the minus sign, hyphen and N-dash. Below you can compare… Symbol hyphen minus sign N-dash M-dash – − [...]

Insert an n-dash or m-dash on a web page or blog

Using the n-dash and m-dash when you are creating a webpage or a blog post can seem confusing, but really it is quite easy and you don’t need to be an HTML genius to do it…

Should I use punctuation after a URL?

When you write a web address at the end of a sentence, should you follow it with punctuation, or use no punctuation (to help avoid breaking the web link)?