Click the omega (Ω) to see the grid that contains the em dash.
No em dash on keyboard windows#
If you hold the WINDOWS key and type a period (.) you'll see an onscreen picker for emojis and symbols. This notably doesn't work in the popular writing application Scrivener, which is very likely a nexus of em dashes. In some Windows applications, you can type the hexadecimal Unicode (2014 for an em dash) and then press the CTRL key while typing X. Unfortunately, as many laptops don't include separate number pads, this leaves the majority of users high and dry. Windows still uses Alt codes, so you can type an em dash by holding down the ALT key and typing 0151 on the numeric keypad. Here are a few of the ways to represent an em dash today: If that weren't enough, Unicode can be represented in decimal or hexadecimal, 3 or base-16. In fact, there are now HTML entities that use Unicode. Today, Unicode is almost universal-but Alt codes and HTML entities are still around. This meant there were at least three ways to type an em dash. As early as 1993, the entity - produced an em dash. Meanwhile, in the early days of the web, HTML specified characters outside the ASCII standard with special entity definitions. Microsoft Alt codes maintained a strong foothold, and Microsoft doubled down on them when it released Windows. In 1988, a Xerox employee named Joe Becker published a paper outlining a universal, international character system called Unicode. At the same time, others were working on ways of encoding larger lists of characters. In the 1980s, Microsoft created "Alt codes," which allowed the user to enter symbols and punctuation not included in the ASCII standard by holding down the ALT key and typing a number on the number pad. The em dash was not part of the ASCII standard. There were initially 128 ASCII codes, including upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, some punctuation, and a few control codes including a beep or bell code.
No em dash on keyboard code#
In 1963, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was published, creating a standard way for computers to represent text. This has to do with the history of text on computers. 1 On Windows and Linux computers, though, you end up in a forest of numbers.
![no em dash on keyboard no em dash on keyboard](https://www.bookhivecorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/keyboard-311803_1280_LI-1024x512.jpg)
And on the Mac, it is: hold down SHIFT and OPTION while typing a hyphen (minus sign) and Bob's your uncle.
![no em dash on keyboard no em dash on keyboard](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a5b9725aeb625663bc3cf04/1570479389575-1Z73HFC5NW6GVEO0BFL0/Em+or+en+dash.png)
Seems like something that should be easy to type. Long-time readers already know I'm a fan, since I sprinkle em dashes throughout my text with little restraint. There's almost no punctuation mark as useful as the em dash-that long, hyphenesque symbol that you can use in place of commas, parentheses, colons, or quotation marks.