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I am writing a technical manual using git.

Is there any problem caused if I use en or em dash such as —?

(For example) Voltage: 5–12 V

Some people say, when this special character is rendered from Markdown to HTML, the rendered character might be broken in some websites.

jkdev
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David
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    This has nothing to do with Git, but I am curious as to who these "some people" are, since even Lynx knows how to render an em or en dash as plain text... – torek Dec 05 '19 at 00:33
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    Nope, as long as it's UTF-8 from beginning to end (which should be the default everywhere nowadays), should be no problem.. – mb21 Dec 08 '19 at 18:54

2 Answers2

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I'm a technical editor at Microsoft and, for over a decade now, I use the HTML code because it's easy to remember! More important is to know when to use an em dash or an en dash.

—

–

Use em dash like you would a colon, or use in pairs like you would parentheses.

I rarely use the en dash, because a hyphen will do.

Adrian Mole
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LindaLu-MSFT
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1

As seen here, this should work.

But, from experience, that makes copy-pasting the content of your technical documentation sometimes frustrating is that em dash is used for command option (--anoption)

VonC
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