Let's forget about FrameMaker for a moment and think about the em dash. The em dash normally demarcates a parenthetical thought where someone is starting a new thought within a single sentence. Typists who can't figure out how to insert an em dash into their documents often type in two sequential hyphens, like this —. Not very professional, but you'll see it all the time.
Back to FrameMaker. If you come across documents that use two dashes instead of em dashes, it's simple to fix. Choose Edit > Find/Change. Type — into the first field and type \m into the second.
One has the option of setting an em dash open or closed. Open means you add a space on each side of the em dash and closed means you don't. As I've observed in my FrameMaker classes, this is a controversial subject for my students, with oddly emotional pleas (considering it's just a typesetting choice) on both sides.
The Chicago Manual of Styles sets em dashes closed, while the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage prefers open em dashes. In my role as classroom mediator, I always recommend that students be consistent: pick a style and stick with it. My personal preference falls somewhere in the middle. I have always preferred to use thin spaces on both sides of my em dashes, but that's just me.
In FrameMaker versions 8 and earlier, it didn't matter how you handled the spacing around your em dashes. While spell checking didn't pick up inconsistencies, it did recognize the em dash with or without spaces and correctly checked the words surrounding it. Not so with FrameMaker version 9. Closed em dashes now produce the dreaded "misspelling?" message on the words that precede and follow it. Ugh. Is this like the Smart Spaces feature that eliminates double spacing so that sentence spacing is no longer up for discussion? I'm guessing no, that this is just a bug.
At least for now, FrameMaker 9 users may want to try out my thin space/em dash/thin space technique, which effectively gets around the problem.
- Open up the Find/Change dialog box
- Find Text: \m
- Change To Text: \i\m\i
I like the look, spell check likes the thin spaces, and everyone is happy again, at least for now.