em and en dash, and hyphen

Question

Level 1

6 points

em and en dash, and hyphen

Hello:
This is really stupid, but I can't find how to set em and en dashes instead of using two dashes. I tried the Pages help menu but got nothing dealing with my problem. I found it once and it worked, but not now. Anyone out there know the answer?
Thanks.
medren

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Feb 4, 2008 6:46 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Jerrold Green1

Level 7

30,210 points

Feb 4, 2008 7:18 PM in response to medren2

medren,

Search for the Discussion "M-Dash Shortcut" in Pages 08 discussions. There are a number of good answers there.

Jerry

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Answer 2

medren2 Author

Level 1

6 points

Feb 4, 2008 8:22 PM in response to Jerrold Green1

Hello Jerry:

Thanks for your response, but I could find just one entry in the Discussion Forum. I'm new to Mac after 14 years on a PC and I haven't found anything on my MacBook to complain seriously about, but this issue might be one of them. I would think that a word processing program such as Pages -- one that is touted as "serious" by users and Apple itself -- would provide an easy way to make em and en dashes, especially since its possible to provide camera-ready copy with Pages. If it's serious publishing, then who wants a double hyphen?? If anyone from Apple development is monitoring these discussions, then please take note of this.
Thanks,
medren

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Answer 3

Peggy

Level 8

41,601 points

Feb 4, 2008 10:01 PM in response to medren2

An en dash is made by typing Option + hyphen. An em dash is Option + Shift + hyphen. It's been that way in Pages & AppleWorks/ClarisWorks as far back as I can remember (maybe before). I'm sure there are other ways, but this is what I learned before Unicode.

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Answer 4

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,807 points

Feb 5, 2008 5:32 AM in response to Peggy

Hello

The shortcuts to such characters aren't specific to one application.
They are defined at the system level.

Apple gave us two useful tools helping us to drive this feature

Keyboard Viewer
and
Character Palette.

You may install them from the System Preference entitled "International" in the tab name "Input menu".

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 5 février 2008 14:32:46)

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Answer 5

medren2 Author

Level 1

6 points

Feb 5, 2008 6:38 AM in response to Peggy

Hello Peggy:
Thanks for your reply—they work, as you can see! But I wonder why Apple doesn't give clear directions on how to achieve these dashes, but it's likely I wasn't looking in the right place.
Thanks again.
medren

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