cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34153611
Title text:
You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3126/
That's not true in general. I personally use the German Extended (E1) layout (when I'm not on mobile) and the em dash is super easy to type. There are also lots of other custom layouts used by people who care about typesetting.
Even people that don't internationally care about typesetting sometimes use them because their tool (like Word and some CMS systems) automatically replace hyphens in specific places with em dashes, or substitute straight double quotes with the correct quotation marks (depending on which country you are from)
I care more about typesetting than the average feller, but LaTeX lets you use three hyphens (
---) to form an em-dash. Didn't know any layouts had a key/chord for 'em.And on macOS, you can usually get an en dash with option dash and em dash with shift option dash