About em-dashes in Pure Blog

6 April 2026

Can you spot the difference between the following punctuation marks?

A hypen - or an em-dash — .

Maybe you can, because the web safe font renders the em-dash just fine. However in the Pure Blog backend — which uses the Menlo font — it's pretty hard to tell.

This is what I see: scr-20260405-qgou-3

This is not a really big deal, I just had to do a double take at first, because they look way too similar. But there is another thing.

I love my em-dashes — way before LLMs made them uncool. But that is not gonna stop me. I will keep using them. In WordPress I was used to typing two hyphens -- and WordPress would magically render an em-dash.

Pure Blog doesn't — it just shows the two hyphens.

So long story short: my from-WordPress-to-Pure-Blog-migrated .md files were full of double hyphens.

To change those to a real em-dash — which is cleaner anyway — use this:

sed -i -E 's/(^|[^-])--([^-]|$)/\1—\2/g' *.md

Typing real em-dashes

On a Mac: Option-Shift-hypen
On Linux: CTRL-Shift-U
On Windows: CTRL-ALT-minus