int64.org

Grammar

Automatic hyphenation

I’ve just in­stalled Hy­phen­ator—a re­ally cool script which au­to­mat­i­cally adds soft hy­phens to words, which means I can fi­nally jus­tify text. If you’ve got Javascript turned on, you should see nice hy­phen­ated line wrap­ping in ad­di­tion to syn­tax high­light­ing on code.

Using proper punctuation marks

I re­cently learned that the lov­able char­ac­ter be­tween the 0 and the = key on QW­ERTY key­boards is not a hy­phen (U+2010) nor a minus (U+2212), but a hy­phen–minus (U+002D). Not just that, but I learned of the ex­is­tence of var­i­ous dashes, such as the fig­ure dash (U+2012), en dash (U+2013), and em dash (U+2014).

Using proper punc­tu­a­tion marks can be es­pe­cially hard for the sim­ple fact that they don’t exist on my key­board. Mi­crosoft Word will au­to­mat­i­cally re­place two hy­phens with a dash, but what about the rest of the apps I use? For now, I’m stuck using the te­dious Alt+Numpad for­mula, or copy–past­ing from the Char­ac­ter Map. I think this auto–cor­rec­tion would be a great thing to in­te­grate into Win­dows, per­haps into an IME. Call it the next evo­lu­tion of input, like how speech recog­ni­tion was added to Vista.