Posted by Els on 10/25/07 18:33

Dylan Parry wrote:

> I've been experimenting with using various different types of dash,
> hyphens and other typographical symbols that aren't present on the
> keyboard. One thing I came across was an inconsistency in the way that
> Internet Explorer 7 displays the hyphen character (not the hyphen-minus,
> but a proper hyphen). FWIW, IE6 doesn't appear to display the character
> at all.

Which one on my keyboard is the minus and which one is the proper
hyphen?

> What I noticed is that the hyphen appears to be placed higher up than it
> should be, for example: "up‐to‐date" is rendered correctly in every

Not when I reply to this usenet post apparently :-)
By the way - your post shows here in a different font from all the
other posts, including your own. I checked the headers, and your other
posts are encoded as windows-1252, while this particular one was in
utf-8. So are my posts, but they read the same as all the other ones.
I never understand why some posts show in a different font...

> browser that I tested, but in IE7 the hyphens are right up at the top of
> the words. It's difficult to explain without actually seeing it in
> action, so http://dylanparry.com/usenet/hyphen_example.htm shows what I
> mean.

http://locusmeus.com/temp/hyphen.gif

It is higher, but not exactly 'right at the top' I think. Are you
seeing it differently?

> It happens with any font that I try, so I'm sure it's not a fonts
> issue - besides, the same fonts display the character fine in other
> browsers.
>
> Can anyone confirm that this is an actual issue, and it's not just
> peculiar to my particular set-up? Does the hyphen character appear at
> all for anyone else? I ask that last question as it doesn't appear in
> IE6 for me, but that's using a virtual machine that has different fonts
> installed etc.

Doesn't appear in IE6 for me either, but it's a stand-alone Eolas
version.
Doesn't appear in IE6 on Windows 98 either.

> Then I started to wonder if there was anything that could be done, and
> indeed whether it is actually worth bothering to try doing anything. I
> suppose the easiest way would be to use scripting to replace the hyphens
> with hyphen-minus characters if using IE.

I've never before noticed any hyphens not displaying though. Different
keyboard? How about just encoding them so they are – entities?

> That way, at least people
> using other browsers will get the correct typographical symbols.
> Actually, the easiest way is of course to just not use hyphen characters
> at all, but I'm being picky and want to use them anyway :)

I guess I'm using minus-hyphens then?
hyphen next to the 0 key on my keyboard: -
hyphen above the + on my numeric pad: -
Are they real hyphens, or minuses?

--
Els http://locusmeus.com/

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