Why not -- instead of {\textendash} ?

Wouldn't it be a good idea to export the endash-character as -- instead of {\textendash}?

Of course, it doesn't really matter for latex, but other tools might be confused by it (does bibtex ever touch these fieds? probably not)
Even if it's just for grep'ing/searching through the bib-files, or trying to import into or pass that the bib-files to some
At least, I can't see any downside to exporting --.
  • I can't see any downside to exporting --.
    neither can I, but we might be missing something. -- universally works for en-dash in LaTeX, right? That's not just for bibtex?
  • edited February 19, 2014
    Yes, -- works fine in LaTeX, (as well as --- for em-dash)
    ( i don't *think* bibtex really does anything with the field )
  • I'm not sure I see the upside of exporting '--'. Which tools are confused by it?

    Many of the TeX transcodings were inherited from code by Matthias Steffens. He'd have to speak to this one.

    However: '--' is a ligature and not all fonts have that ligature available. This is particularly true for greek and cyrillic fonts. This was why the command was added to LaTeX2e--the symbol will be constructed correctly across all fonts.

    Given this greater compatibility, I'd want to see a better reason than "aesthetics" for why we'd change this.
  • I did post this as a honest question.
    If it causes problems for certain fonts then that certainly seems like a good reason to keep it.
  • To be sure: it was worth asking.

    If you have examples of where this causes other tools to break, I'd like to know. I'm not sure if we'd be able to do much about that, but it is good to at least know what limitations this choice might have.
  • .bst files made with the makebst script do not handle {\textendash} correctly. In particular, the function first.page, which is supposed to strip out dashes and ending pages, is confused and ends up leaving everything.
Sign In or Register to comment.