alt Hacker NewsTechnically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.
Technically, there are supposed to be hair spaces around the dashes, not regular spaces. They're small enough to be sometimes confused for kerning.
Em dashes used as parenthetical dividers, and en dashes when used as word joiners, are usually set continuous with the text. However, such a dash can optionally be surrounded with a hair space, U+200A, or thin space, U+2009 or HTML named entities   and   These spaces are much thinner than a normal space (except in a monospaced (non-proportional) font), with the hair space in particular being the thinnest of horizontal whitespace characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks:
And they usually add space to the right of these: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/05/micro-typography-sp...1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space
Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.