Where did my em dash go?

Thank you for the link. I've done that now.

Hi Rothrock,

You can file a Bug Report to the Captivate team from the following link and filling out the form:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=5

Best,
Aaron

Captiv8r - – — (If your browser renders them correctly that would be a hyphen, en dash, and em dash.) The en and em dashes are little horizontal lines that are the width of, get this, the letter "n" and the letter "m" (if you say it outloud it will make sense) of the font they are used in.

They hyphen is used to break words across lines and create (oddly) hyphenated words. En dashes represent the idea of through as in June 15 – 17 or September – December. They should have a space on either side of them, just like the word through would.

Finally the em dash is the longest and represents a break in the sentence–kind of like this–and is usually used without spaces on either side. It is similar to a colon or parenthesis.

Most people don't use them correctly or notice them, but for those of us who do it is horrible to see a hyphen where no hyphen should be! It really is the equivalent of something like, "Well I can't get a capital letter a, so I'll just spell everything with the lower case version."

flarext – Strange. I am certain I am doing alt-0151. I didn't even try en dash. I'll try that tomorrow. So how does one file a bug report?

Hi Rotchrock,

I can see this behavior happening in Captivate 2 & 3 for the en-dash (Alt + 0150)character but not the em-dash (Alt + 0151). I tried several fonts including Arial Narrow. Other special characters have been working fine.

As soon as I click Apply, the en-dash changes to a hyphen. Time to file a bug report, I guess.

Best,
Aaron

Thanks. I'll just use the old typography equivalent --

Captivate must be doing something funny behind the scenes for special characters. One of the Adobe Experts in these forums mentioned that Captivate/Flash converts all the captions to images when you publish, so maybe the issue is related to that.

About the only other thing I could suggest is to try a different character from an entirely different font set that happens to look like an em dash... maybe there's a similar character in Wingdings or Marlett or something like that?

Well, I think the font does have it. I tried several different fonts. And I did try pasting from Word. The strange thing is that it shows in the properties editor and it shows in the caption when I click apply. It just goes away when I click okay.

In my font text most of the fonts did show something in the properties panel, but courier only showed a little box. Some I'm guessing that is what happens if the font doesn't have that character.

But as soon as I clicked okay, they all went back to a hyphen -- including the little courier box.

Does Arial Narrow have an em dash in the font set? If not, that's your problem right there?

If Arial Narrow does contain an em dash, have you tried pasting it in from someplace else, like MS Word? You might be able to trick Captivate by pasting in the character instead of creating it in Captivate. I use the Character Map utility in Windows (in WinXP, it's Start | Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Character Map) to simulate bulleted lists by pasting in custom characters. I sometimes have to reapply the correct font in Captivate, but if I don't change the character itself, it works fine.

PS: Forgot to mention I tried some other special characters like ellipsis and copyright and they work, just not the em dash!