A standard ASCII hyphen-minus character (-) is used for hyphenation tasks, like ‘non-standard’. Follow the rules of WikiPedia:Hyphen. This character is available on all keyboard layouts. Alternatively, we could standardize on the Unicode hyphen (‐,U+2010); this is up for debate.
A Unicode en-dash (–, U+2013) separates closed ranges, like ‘pp.100–102’. Follow the rules of WikiPedia:Dash#En_dash.
A Unicode em-dash (—, U+2014) denotes a parenthetical statement — like this one — or an open range. Follow the rules of WikiPedia:Dash#Em_dash. An alternative convention to the em-dash where no em-dash is available is to use two hyphens, with no surrounding space. This is to be replaced with em-dashes, with surrounding space, where found.
Two dashes are still used to start a UserName signature. The quotation dash (―) is tricky to input and likely unavailable on many older systems; it may also be inappropriate in this usage, as WikiPedia:Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash only describes using it in place of quotation marks. The em-dash (—) is similarly questionable.
The minus (−, U+2212) and figure-dash (‒, U+2012) characters may be useful replacements for the hyphen-minus where appropriate. Figure-dash is uncommon and hence may not render on many browsers; minus has its own HTML entity, so should be more widely supported. Neither are currently in use, however.
An ellipsis "refers to any omitted part of speech that is understood; i.e. the omission is intentional" (source: WikiPedia:Ellipsis). While three periods (.) can be used, there is a Unicode character point for an ellipsis character (...,U+2026) that is preferred where possible. Exact typographical rules (e.g. use of space before the ellipsis) are up to personal preference.
Proper quotation marks are preferred over apostrophes; follow the rules of WikiPedia:Quotation_mark. French-language pages can now use the guillemet (« ... ») for a more traditional look.
The Unicode standard recommends that apostrophes be represented by a single closing quotation mark, U+2019. I have hitherto used the apostrophe-quote, but this should be corrected in future, e.g. “the '90s” to “the ’90s”.
Thanks Chris for your french guillemets. I tried before to open a project on CraoWiki:PetitGuideTypographiquePourUsageWiki, but let's say it never worked. Pehraps a bit too complex. Sure, « guillemets » could make sense if — one day — some people wrote french articles... For the moment, I'd be interested in knowing how to type non-ascii characters on Windows.
My suggestion who could be discussed for french writing would be to respect a small punctuation convention extracted from this picture :
The re-adaptation of this [excellent french article about typography] could be planned later for our wiki-use. I plan to move later your suggestion and discussion on a future page. May be ConventionsPonctuation in french ;) -- ChristopheDucamp
e.g. « She said what ? Unbelievable : I told her that wasn't true »
Thanks Chris. Looks good. The table is translated on ConventionsPonctuation. Let's say for the moment, I cannot say anything about any sequence as « alt+XXX ». My numeric laptop keyboard does not seem to work. Agree to forget any « espace fine insécable » -- ChristopheDucamp
Using javascript to provide user configurable macros seems possible, so the user could bind common/difficult sequences to say a alt+digit key combination. -- JaredWilliams