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Shortcut key for em dash?

I'm stupid and the special character palette in Pages makes no sense to me and U+ codes and all that is just Microsoft crap to me that I really don't want to deal with. I don't even know what purpose they serve.

Anyone know the shortcut key for the em dash? I can get the en dash — with shift-option-hyphen, but i need the longer one.

MacBook Pro 17", Mac OS X (10.5.7), 2.4 GHz 2GB

Posted on Oct 7, 2009 3:03 PM

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Posted on Oct 7, 2009 3:57 PM

Command + Option + - gives —.

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9 replies

Oct 7, 2009 4:14 PM in response to Peggy

Yeah, but that's an en dash.

- dash - used for a minus sign for example

- hyphen - used for hyphenating words, like re-enter

— en-dash - used with a range of numbers, like 54—56

—— em-dash - I can't make one, but it should be lengthier than the en-dash and is used for parenthetical statements. The cat in the hat—not to be confused with the story of the same name—bleh dee blah.

So any ideas on how to make an em-dash and its shortcut key?

Oct 8, 2009 6:46 AM in response to keraunoscopia

keraunoscopia wrote:
-



Hmm. Looks like the en-dash doesn't work in Safari.

Option - hyphen = en-dash in Pages. Option - shift - hyphen = em-dash.


True for an English keyboard
reverse for a French one !
But the en-dash doesn't work in Safari. No wonder I was getting confused!!


– — I got these two chars in Safari with the described shortcuts. The first one is en-dash, the second is em-dash 😉

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 8 octobre 2009 15:46:23

Oct 8, 2009 3:18 PM in response to fruhulda

"But the two first ones do look different! The second looks a tiny bit shorter than the first one."

I noticed that too and even brought the hyphens together. I decided it was an optical illusion, but now that you pointed it out, it isn't.

-
– en dash (option-hyphen)
-


When I was editing a Wikipedia article with Safari, the en-dash appeared in the edit window as a tiny hyphen, but the final result on the Wiki page appeared as an en-dash should.

So is this an error with Safari then? TextEdit as well shows the option-hyphen as a shorter dash than a normal hyphen.

Shortcut key for em dash?

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