On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 13:15 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote: > But if we're going to write guidelines, here's my semi-professinal > opinion: > > * Using hyphens instead of dashes for parenthetical text is awful. > Using unspaced hyphens-like this-is downright confusing. > > * I'm old and I like unspaced em-dashes (a). A lot of people these > days are switching to spaced en-dashes (b). I think that trend will > continue. > > * Spaced em-dashes (c) are way too wide. > > * Unspaced en-dashes are for indicating ranges. We should use those > too, though the hyphen isn't quite as ugly when misused in this case. Compelling. I’ve updated the wiki page to standardise on spaced en-dashes. https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/UnicodeUsage The only characters left which need discussion are quotation marks. After looking through a few UI guidelines, the consensus seems to be to either: • use double quotation marks everywhere; or • use italics when referring to UI elements and double quotation marks otherwise (Microsoft’s guidelines). LibreOffice’s guidelines are the only ones which required using _single_ quotes, but that’s for technical reasons (they didn’t used to be able to escape double quotes). This seems fairly conclusive. From a quick look through Totem’s POT file, quotation marks are mainly used for quoting file names at the moment. UI labels are often quoted when referenced as well. Personally I quite like the idea of reducing punctuation clutter by using text styling (italics, monospace, or something else) for identifying UI labels and filenames. Mallard renders <gui> elements in a different colour to the rest of the text, for example, rather than quoting them. Philip
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