Dashing through a document

 The humble dash -- "-" -- has really gone through quite the transformation lately with a bunch of pretentious blowhard typography nerds giving it all sorts of purposes and different pseudo-looks that makes zero actual difference in reading.

I was made aware of an otherwise noble effort to modernize old public domain e-books that makes an effort to clean up e-books from other sources that have all sorts of typographical errors, formatting issues, and other problems to create a more unified and quality set of releases. What I did not expect was a site apparently crammed full of typography nerds who created a very long manual dedicated to exacting specifications regarding e-book style. It wouldn’t really be that difficult or problematic to clean up old e-books using very simple guides -- fix errors, fix formatting problems, and so on -- but these people apparently are obsessed with creating some sort of crazy perfection. I mean, good for them, I suppose, but wow.

But as I was looking through the manual, I came upon a part that I’ve never quite understood -- the modern demand to use all sorts of crazy alternatives to the humble dash character. You know, the thing that on a standard US keyboard is beside the zero key, easy to type, and just works for all sorts of uses? To typography nerds, this isn’t enough. According to the manual on this site (and many other places I’ve seen), we need to use all sorts of dashes, all of them looking very much like a standard dash, to “correctly” make a text reasonably readable.

What?

"Figure dashes" for phone numbers?  Really?  555-1234 isn't good enough with a standard dash?  A "minus sign glyph"?  Give me a break.  -4°.  Look at that.  Nothing wrong there.  No "minus sign glyph", just a dash.  "En dashes" for ranges?  On a scale of 0-100 in common sense, that's a 0.  Then there's the "em dash", a replacement for the common sense, logical, elegant double dash.  You want to say something and then move on to something along the same thought, you double the dash.  You say something -- then you say something else.  Clear, easy, and doesn't require some laughable modernized garbage.  And it goes on and on with many more examples of using "alternative" dashes, with only the non-breaking dash that allows a word with a dash to not break at the end of a line and be taken as a whole word, like "e-book", although from what I've seen, that doesn't even work correctly and it'll break that special dash anyway.  All these characters have to be specifically generated, which is a pain to do.  It's so much easier to just use a regular dash you get when you reach up and hit the key beside the zero key (on US QWERTY keyboards, anyway; no idea if it's somewhere else on other keyboard layouts) than have to figure out which "new and improved" dash to use and how to type it in.

Just write normally.  We don't need any of this trash.  Even the humble quotation mark now needs some new "curly/typographer's quotes" trash instead of just typing a quote, which isn't fancy enough for you typography nerds, apparently.

Seriously -- give me a break.

[A side note: I am posting this again from another (dead) blog I used to have, which took every single dash and quote character I typed and turned it into exactly the garbage characters I was ranting about, so to post what I wanted to post, I had to take a screenshot of what I typed and post those to get my point across.  According to Blogger's preview, it shouldn't happen here, but if it does, I'm going to be very upset.]