For probably perfectly-well intended reasons, Discourse replaces -- with –, an en dash, and --- with —, an em dash.
I find this a minor irritation, because when people use -- in writing in email (or on the olden days in a typewriter), they almost always mean to use an em dash. En dash is only used in several fairly obscure cases, like range of numbers or times (“The party goes from 7–9 pm”), scores or voting results (“She won in a landslide, 78–22!”), or occasionally for complex adjectives (“World War I–era”). All of these use cases are represented by a single- character on a typewriter or normal keyboard, and most people’s writings.
So basically, what Discourse does is almost always wrong (for a highly-pedantic value of “wrong”).
I feel like suggesting that this is a bug that should be fixed globally is probably tilting at windmills, so I’m wondering how to configure my site locally so it at least that doesn’t bug me. I thought about using the word replacement feature, but that seems to also mess up cases where one uses --------- or similar for horizontal rules or headings in Markdown.
うーん、ルールを単純に変更することはできません。なぜなら、en dash と em dash の好ましい使い方は、言語や国によって異なるようです。ドイツ語では、-- と書くときに en dash を確実に使用したいと考えており、フランス語やイギリス英語でも同様である可能性があると思います。少なくとも、Dash - Wikipedia をざっと見た限りでは、そのように思われます。
サイトの設定で十分でしょうか? Discourse はユーザーのインターフェース言語に基づいて en dash と em dash を自動的に切り替えるべきでしょうか? 最善の解決策が何であるか分かりません…