So You Think You Can Mac Operate – En Dash versus Hyphen

Being a pedantic old me, I always feel annoyed when I see designers use hyphens instead of en dashes such as:
1 June 2009 - 3 June 2009 or 2-4pm (annoying),
instead of:
1 June 2009 – 3 June 2009 or 2–4pm (appropriate use of en dash).

An en dash (–) is usually longer than a hyphen in length and is used to indicate a range of values such as dates, times or numbers. For example:
This display home will be open on every Sunday, 1–1.30pm. The price range is $250,000 – $285,000.

A hyphen (-) is usually used to connect words that break at the end of a line, or simply connect words to form compound words such as ice-cream, ill-natured, and run-of-the-mill. It is usually shorter in length and its shape varies from one font to another. For this occasion, I usually use en dashes instead of hyphens to represent NIL (no value) in financial tables like those in annual reports.

Some will argue that they will not risk changing clients’ copies if the clients use hyphens instead of en dashes inappropriately. However, by checking and replacing them precisely, this will not only improve the colour and texture of the body copy, but also show the mac operator or designer’s skill of accuracy and being highly attentive-to-detail. And there are a few easy tricks to perform the replacement precisely in Indesign and will discuss these in the next few posts.

Technical (Indesign) – Balance Ragged Lines

Ever wonder why you cannot put a word or two from the next line back to the end of the line above, you might have Balance Ragged Lines turned on in your Paragraph setting.

This is a handy feature to save the workload of adjusting awkward uneven lines at the end of every single paragraph (usually left aligned) in a document, especially widows. I found that it works extremely well with multi-column document layout like newsletter as the paragraphs tend to be very narrow in width and this often cause ugly flows on every column right hand sides and also widows.

To turn it on or off, bring up Paragraph Palette (Command+Option+T) and click on the palette right facing arrow then you will find the feature Balance Ragged Lines. Use this feature with care as some times it might make your paragraph too short in width compared to the rest and probably the old soft returns with our manual adjustment will be better for this occasion.