Non-breaking hyphens

[davidlevine]

I just had a response from a critiquer which indicated that all of the non-breaking hyphens in the MS Word file that I sent her vanished somewhere along the line. Which means that a sentence like "I didn't know -- couldn't have known -- that the still-smoking gun was in my hand" would turn into the nonsensical "I didn't know couldn't have known that the stillsmoking gun was in my hand".

I search and replace all my hyphens to non-breaking hyphens when I prepare a manuscript for submission, so that hyphenated words and em-dashes don't break across lines. This is appropriate for paper submissions. But this isn't the first time those non-breaking hyphens have failed to appear in an electronic submission. I think I'm going to stop doing that.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I can't help with the "still-smoking", but why don't you use em-dashes—actual ones—for your em-dash needs? Is it a manuscript submission "required style" issue?

[davidlevine]

Yep. Standard manuscript format uses two hyphens for an em-dash.

Manuscripts are submitted in Courier, where the em-dash character is only a couple pixels longer than a hyphen, and are intended for reading from hardcopy by human typesetters. Using em-dash characters is verboten (as are curly quotes and the ellipsis character). This may be a relic of the past, but it's still standard operating procedure for most publishers.