534078 - Please add em dash and en dash to Thunderbird's "Insert > Characters and Symbols..." menu

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 217830

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[eric raeburn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

When composing an email in Thunderbird, the writer should be able to insert em and en dashes.  These are important notations in the English language and should be supported.  Currently, the only reasonable alternative in TB is a double dash--rather awkward for both writer and reader.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

What is an em dash or a en dash (sorry I'm not a native english writer/reader) ? Aren't those characters accessible from the keyboard ?

Comment 2

[eric raeburn]

Ludovic: Neither the em nor en dashes are implemented on any keyboard I have seen.  The horizontal bar produced by the keyboard is the hyphen, sometimes (incorrectly) called a dash.  But hyphens are used differently than dashes.  Rather than write a thorough explanation here, I refer you to the very good article at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash .

Comment 3

[eric raeburn]

Ludovic: Neither the em nor en dashes are implemented on any keyboard I have seen.  The horizontal bar produced by the keyboard is the hyphen, sometimes (incorrectly) called a dash.  But hyphens are used differently than dashes.  Rather than write a thorough explanation here, I refer you to the very good article at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash .

I guess I should mention, to avoid confusion, I incorrectly used the term "double dash" in the Description text for this enhancement; I should have written "double hyphen".

Comment 4

[eric raeburn]

Ludovic: I just read in the Wikipedia article that there are keyboard combinations for Mac and Windows that allow the user to insert these characters.  However, a Google search shows that the situation for Linux may be more difficult.  Hence, including these characters in "Insert > Characters and Symbols..." may be a better solution, because it would provide a uniform, cross-platform solution for all users.