Spaces around an M-dash

AndySymons

There appears to be a rule somewhere that removes the spaces around an M-dash in a Title or Publication title. Is there a way that I can turn this off? It only happens with M-dashes, not N-dashes or hyphens.

so

‘Wood — “Primitive” Material for the Creation of “German Sculpture”’

is rendered

‘Wood—“Primitive” Material for the Creation of “German Sculpture”’

whereas

‘Wood – “Primitive” Material for the Creation of “German Sculpture”’

is rendered as written. (So this is my workaround for the moment).

I am using the MHRA3 standard. Their style guide does not specifically require spaces around the M-dash, but they do use spaces in their examples, and that is my preference.

This is another example (like capitalisation in another thread) where I just want Zotero to leave the titles the way they are typed, i.e. as the author / publisher wrote them.

bwiernik

Standard English punctuation rules have spaces around en dash used in this position but no spaces around em dash. That’s correct typesetting, and it’s hard coded into the citation processor, so not easily modifiable if at all. I would suggest not worrying about it.

adamsmith

I'm not seeing this in Zotero, so might be juris-m specific?
(FWIW, I believe the typographic rules are to not use spaces in the US and use spaces in the UK, but I agree that we should probably not try to address that level of detail, especially because the rules aren't that universal)

AndySymons

@bwiernik What are 'standard English punctuation rules'? I googled the topic and find arguments for and against spaces. However, I don't want to get into that discussion here; the main thing is, I don't want Jurism / Zotero making these decisions for me at all — I want to make them myself.

In this case, Jurism is forcing me to change all my headings either to use an N-dash with spaces, (acceptable but not strictly compliant) or substitute a colon or brackets depending on the use (which is stylistically correct but not what the original author wrote).

"Don't worry about it" is not an option. I am proof-reading a PhD thesis due for submission in 8 weeks and ‘Wood—“Primitive”...' is not acceptable.

AndySymons

@adamsmith I did some tests in a dummy file in Jurism to demonstrate what I said. Having installed Jurism, I don't want to go back Zotero because I am afraid of messing something up with Jurism and my thesis.

adamsmith

Are you seeing the same thing in the style editor (assuming that's in the same place in Juris-m, that'd be Tools --> Developer)?

adamsmith

@bwiernik FWIW, I don't think this is right, btw.:

Standard English punctuation rules have spaces around en dash used in this position but no spaces around em dash.

E.g. the AP Style manual has spaces around em dashes. While Chicago (and APA, I believe) don't, so this isn't even a GB/US divide; there's just no strong agreement.
I've seen various suggestions around this: spaces after em-dashes should be nbsp so you don't get linebreaks, some fonts add them as part of the character etc.
In any case, I don't think this is anywhere near clear-cut enough for citeproc to just automate, but as I say, I'm also not seeing that, neither in the style editor nor in the Word add-on, so I'm wondering if something else is going on.

bwiernik

Is an APA family of style being used? It's possible that citeproc's uppercase subtitles processing (which involves some punctuation normalization) is coming in here

adamsmith

Interesting. I am indeed seeing this in APA (but they're using MHRA, so doesn't seem relevant)
Edit: not seeing this in other styles without title-casing such as Vancouver, either, so this does seem to be APA-specific. Is it possible that juris-m has a more aggressive setting for this in citeproc?