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.
