Mark Jaquith on dashes and hyphens in the editor:
So, three hyphens always gets you an em-dash. Two hyphens gets you an em-dash if spaced apart from surrounding words. Else, you get an en-dash.
I don’t mind the Visual Editor as much as some others seem to. Half of everything I write goes directly into the WordPress Visual Editor. Learning the editor’s behavior, like what Jaquith describes, makes the process quite a bit more pleasant.
This actually isn’t the visual editor… this is done on the fly by filters on
the_content
and other such hooks. You get this whether or not you use the visual editor.Ah, yeah you’re right. A bit of an off-topic comment by me then.
Speaking of the visual editor, don’t forget that there is a button for custom characters, if you want to go hunting for dashes.
I wish the dotorg codex had good beginner/end user documentation like this that I could link to instead!