Then click 'options', and you'll be able to map your Compose key. In Gnome, KDE or Unity you just need to open the 'Keyboard Layout' in your settings menu. I might be crazy, but you can easily simulate a compose button on your keyboard. 'But Justin,' I hear you saying, 'I don't have a Compose key on my keyboard. The compose key also makes typing dashes quick: 'Compose' follow by '-' creates an em dash and '-.' creates an en dash. An em dash (-) is a special type of dash longer than a hyphen (-) and an en dash (-) that is often used to replace commas, colons, or parenthesis based on context. Further digging and searching made me aware of the 'Compose' key, which makes the creation of many different characters–especially the characters with accents common in French, Spanish and a number of other languages– simple to create. If the character does not have an HTML entity, you can use the decimal (dec) or hexadecimal (hex) reference. You can find any character here–the code is at the bottom-left of the window (highlighted above).įor two miserable hours I thought the above set of instructions were my fate. If you want any of these characters displayed in HTML, you can use the HTML entity found in the table below. Want to learn the other codes? Load the 'Character Map' program, if your distro came with one. This guide has all the essential methods for making a long. It is quite useful to pause between two sentences or phrases. Furthermore, by pressing three times hyphen key, users can make a long dash in the document. To insert an en-dash in your document, hold down the Alt key and type 0150 on the numeric keypad an em-dash is produced by holding down the Alt key and typing 0151. The em-dash is typically used in sentences, as a dash between clauses. Apple's operating system OS X comes with a couple of keyboard shortcuts that make typing em and en dash a snap. Making a long dash is possible by inserting the em-dash character and shortcut key ALT+0151 in Google Docs. Wider still is the em-dash, which is just as wide as a lowercase m.

The symbol Em Dash is included in the Dashes Subblock of the General Punctuation Block and was approved as part of Unicode version 1.1 in. Em Dash html code can be seen just above on this page. Keep reading! Create Em and En Dashes On A Mac!įirst up: the easy one. A long dash is in most cases, and an average for the designation of ranges (1939-1945) and in compound names (in English punctuation). Here's how to make your favorite punctuation on your favorite operating system. I'm going to stop restructuring sentences out of laziness, and I'm going to help you do so as well.

There are online tools for creating em dashes, and I've resorted to Googling 'en dash' and copying the resulting punctuation, though This means the text editors and browsers I now do my writing in are dashless wastelands.

But outside programs with their own shortcut, I never got around to learning how to write em or en dashes. I stopped using word processors when I started writing for the Internet, however, because they add a bunch of nonsense code to my writing. I know their shortcut for an em dash–type two dashes between two words and they will transform once you type a space after the second word. What's my dumb reason? I've stopped using Word and Open/Libre Office.

Long dash character