You can also take these four characters and assign them to an AutoText or AutoCorrect entry so they will be easy to use in the future. The result is four characters (all non-breaking hyphens) that appear as a single character since they basically overprint each other just a bit. (You may have to play with this figure based on the font you are using.) The By field to the right of the Spacing drop-down list should change to 1 pt.

Using the Spacing drop-down list, choose Condensed.

The Character Spacing tab of the Font dialog box.

Make sure the Character Spacing tab is selected.(This technique works best if you use four non-breaking hyphens.) You can minimize or virtually eliminate the natural spaces between the non-breaking hyphens by following these steps: The problem with this solution is that the non-breaking hyphens end up looking like a dashed line, not a solid em dash. Many people get around the problem by putting two, three, or even four non-breaking hyphens in a row to simulate a non-breaking em dash. If you want your em dashes to be sticky on both ends (sort of like a very long non-breaking hyphen), then you may be out of luck. In this way, an em dash can appear as the last character on a line, but never as the first character on a line. Thus, in the phrase 'John-the original author-was flabbergasted,' the em dashes will always stay with the words John and author as the end of a line is reached. Meanwhile, back in Word-land, an em dash is always sticky to the word it follows. Both of those instances are beyond the scope of this tip here we are talking about single em dashes. It indicates that a space may follow or precede (but not follow and precede) a 2-em dash to indicate missing letters, or spaces can appear on both sides of a 3-em dash to indicate missing words. Just so you know, I am relying on The Chicago Manual of Style for my reference here. (For those who don't fall into this category, please excuse this tangent, but I know from sad experience that debating punctuation can be a somewhat religious experience.) Some of you may take exception to the claim of no surrounding spaces. (An en dash may be a different story that we won't get into in this tip.)įor those readers who are editors and/or typographers, a quick side-trip may be in order here.

In other words, there are typically no spaces around an em dash.

Normally an em dash is placed in a document between two words. However, it should be noted that an em dash may not work exactly as you want it to. Exactly how you create these types of dashes has been covered in other issues of WordTips. Word allows you to enter many different typographical symbols, among them en dashes and em dashes.

Em dash in word 2013