In this first installment of the Typography tips series, we learn two very good things:
1. How to type an actual ellipsis instead of philistinely (I’m sure that’s a word) typing 3 periods in a row. All we need to remember to type is alt + 0133. Apparently this is very important for editors, printers and general web people. After coming across the article on Smashing Magazine, I rushed back to my blog dashboard to edit my previous posts. I am very fond of the ellipsis and I used to type 3 periods in a row. Now thanks to alt + 0133, I can be just a little bit snobby now.
2. How to type an em dash properly instead of hitting the dash key twice. Yup, I’m guilty of this as well. So just type alt + 0151 and voilà — a real em dash. Incidentally the à is made with alt + 133, not to be confused with alt +0133.
In sum:
alt + 0133 = …
alt + 0151 = —
Everybody all sorted?
* * *
UPDATE:
Anon here has raised a very important point and this next bit needs to be included. So good on ya for pointing that out! The codes above only work on a desktop PC because it uses that numeric keypad. On a laptop it’s different, try shift+alt+- (option instead of alt on a mac) to produce the em dash.
Like so —
For the ellipsis, type alt or option+;
…and there you have it
2 Comments
August 16, 2008 at 5:53 am
SO GOOD!!!! OMG. hello º¡££ hey! it doesn’t work. º¡∞¡. HEY!!! i’m doing something wrong. you gotta walk me through this. chicka soon hey!!!
May 3, 2009 at 6:27 am
Well, except that em-dashes are really only good as proper dashes in American English typesettings. In most circumstances (like anything else where you need something dash-like, or generally in British English or any other language), use the en-dash instead (Alt+0150).
Secondly, the em-dash goes with a *hairline* space before and after, while the en-dash should usually have a non-breaking-space before, and a normal space afterwards…