Warning: while I am a typographer, I have learned my trade in Germany, thusly I only know the exact typographic terminology in German. I’m trying to find the right English wording for most German terms, but since we are talking about a professional jargon of a highly specialised craftsmanship with a few hundred years of history on its back, you won’t find most of these terms in a normal dictionary. Please forgive me, if I end up using one or two wrong expressions for typographic features in English.

Dashes

There are three types of dashes (actually there’s one more, but as far as I know only in German).

hyphen [ - ]

The first one isn’t even a dash, but a hyphen and is used for word hyphenation, something one wouldn’t do manually on the web, but rather put in ­ (soft hyphenation). It’s also used for combining several words into one like mother-in-law, duty-free etc.

n-dash [ – ]

The second one is called the n-dash, because it’s about as wide as the letter “n”. This dash is used as a proper minus (to be super correct the minus is actually a different character and usually a tiny bit thicker than a dash, but on the Web I guess using the ndash instead is “fair use”). The ndash is used widely in the US surrounded by spaces as a dash for inserting a new thought into a sentence – just like this. This is also the correct usage of the dash in German.

The ndash is also used in Germany instead of two zeros (€20,–) for prices (I’ll get into the details of number separators in a second), although the “canonical” dash to replace two zeros is actually as long as a quad. Some say it’s equal to the mdash (German Wikipedia I’m looking at you), which is not correct, but on the web you don’t have much choice, do you?

The quad dash is as wide as two zeros, the mdash is usually slightly shorter (also depends on the font used). The reason for using such a long dash is so that numbers keep lining up neatly in tables. At least as long as you use a font with tabular figures—numbers which all have the same width so they line up neatly in a table (usually proportional numbers have varying widths, especially the 1). Within normal text the dash does look overly long, so the ndash is used instead.

m-dash [ — ]

In Britain, however, the mdash with no spaces before or after is still in wide use for introducing a new thought into a sentence—many think this looks weird, but since I am a reactionary old geezer, I prefer that type of dash when I’m writing in English—and it’s my blog, so there.

Quotes

You wouldn’t believe how many correct ways of quoting there are. Even in German alone there are two, or better three-ish correct yet different ways of using quotation marks. But let’s start with the lingua franca of the Web.

English

“” Since curly quotes look somewhat like a 6 or a 9 people tend to refer to the numbers to illustrate the usage, thusly English quotation is 66 99 both up:

“Proper quotation marks in English”

German (Germany)

In German there are German quotes (who’d have thunk?) used in the form of 99 down and 66 up:

„So setzt man korrekte Anführungszeichen auf Deutsch“

You can also use the French Guillements for quotation, however you’ll have to use them the other (non-French) way:

»So setzt man korrekte Anführungszeichen auf Deutsch«

And of course if you quote any foreign language in German, you are free to use either German quotation marks (one of the two that is), or you can use the “foreign” quotation marks, so it integrates better with the appearance of the language.

German (Switzerland)

As long as you use the German quotation marks it’s all the same, but if you want to use the Guillemets you’ll have to use them the French way (or better the somewhat French way, because the Swiss way of using French Guillements is by using them in the French alignment, but without the spaces):

«So setzt man Anführungzeichen in der Schweiz»

French

In France they use the Guillemets, too, but it wouldn’t be French if it wasn’t slightly different than anyone else, so typographically correct quotation in France puts spaces between the quotes and the text (and if you get really into details one shouldn’t put in full spaces, but a little less, however on the Web that would be a bit too much to ask for).

« Français aiment faire les choses différemment »

Numbers

Is your head humming already? Wait, that’s where the real fun starts! Dealing with numbers and how to display them typographically correctly is yet another intriguing task when you’re in Europe…

Thousands Separators & Decimals

So as an English speaker you’ve been taught to put a comma  ,  every three digits from the right to separate thousands. Great. And for decimals you’d be using a point or “full stop”, right? Well first of all you are in the minority doing that, because countless other countries and languages handle this differently:

If you’re in Germany, France or any other one of the countries to the left, the number 1,000,000.25 “one million point two five” looks like this:

1.000.000,25

While the French would be writing the number the same as the Germans, the Swiss—having both languages as their official languages—found an interesting alternative notation to avoid confusion:

1’000’000.25 or
1’000’000,25

Funny enough ISO standard 31-0 says for grouping digits one should use a space (non-breaking and if possible a small space that’s not as wide as a normal one) but never commas or points in order to avoid confusion. So it probably would be best to write the above number

1 000 000,25 or
1 000 000.25

yet nobody really bothers. It’s a wonderful world isn’t it? And this is only the beginning. If you look at proper phone number formatting for each country you’ll be at the brink of insanity (maybe that’s the point of no return, where most of us typographers start becoming the whacky, obsessed people we mostly are…), so l won’t be going there at least not in this little article.