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In German that’s the way it’s done: en-dash with spaces, em-dashes (basically) don’t exist.

I use em dashes with spaces in German (and English) all the time — I just like it better and don't care about arbitrary rules and traditions.

Yea em dash with spaces looks better to me too, I find that it’s harder to read if the em dash is there without surrounding spaces. Looks too cramped, not separated enough.

I have never understood the classical rule of no spaces around em-dashes. If you’re going to use fancy dashes at all, an em-dash represents a clear pause, a break in thought — something more robust than a mere comma. Typesetting an em-dash sometimes literally touching the words on either side has the opposite effect, visually connecting those words rather than separating them, and unlike a lot of the typographical snobbery we sometimes engage in, that one is a well-known (at least to designers) effect of proximity. Personally I prefer a thin space rather than a full one in media where it’s possible, purely for cosmetic reasons, but I’d rather have a normal space than none.

I think that is not really true? There is the "Gedankenstrich" and one can see it in texts. Or do you mean, that it is so rare, that German language almost does not use it? I think that depends on the writer.

Yes, and the Gedankenstrich is usually set as en-dash with spaces around, only rarely as em-dash. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbgeviertstrich#Gedankenstri...

Hum, a hyphen is still an entity of its own (it may be even a short, slanted dash in some fonts), then there's the en-dash for association (e.g. "ZDF – Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen"), and there's the "Gedankenstrich", which performs more like a separator. Three typographical entities to express three different concepts. (But there's a tendency of mixing the en-dash with spaces and the "Gedankenstrich", as the latter also comes with surrounding spaces, which may appear overly exaggerated in some fonts.)

Sure. As far as I‘m aware the Gedankenstrich is usually set as en-dash with spaces in German, though [1].

1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbgeviertstrich#Gedankenstri...

However, it is the en-dash, properly, rather than the hyphen. I quite like that punctuation.

Now, anyone typing random texts to a friend or a few need not care, but I think people that write in a professional capacity to more than a few people should know and care.

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