Example tables in help entries: en dash insteads of hyphen as minus sign

[T139]

Hello everybody,

does anybody know why (or find equally confusing that) NI uses en dashes instead of hyphens in multiple example tables of LabVIEW help entries? Doing so, they often fail to make their point, contradict themselves and/or provide information and examples that are plain incorrect. Please consider the appended help entry with my notes. Although I chose 'Decimal string to number' function as an example, the very VI is replacable.

I would suggest replacing the en dashes for hyphens (or minus sign of the respective os, if that should make a difference). What is your opinion in this regard?

Thanks and best regards

T139

P. S.: I first noticed this with the VI 'Hexadecimal string to number' and opened a topic (https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Hexadecimal-string-to-number-Minus-sign-hyphen-vs-en-dash-for/m-p/4...), but as my confusion there was partly due to unexpected conversion of values that was not mentioned in the help at all, I wanted to start a new and more general topic as this seems to affect multiple VIs and the respective help entries.

[Bob_Schor]

Well, you are right and you are wrong.  Those into Type know that there are 4 "dash" characters -- hyphen (the shortest, used to indicate a "breakin+g prefix" (I made up that term) such as "non-unique" and to indicate word broken at the end of a line of text and continued on the next line, minus which indicates a negative quantity, and should be the same width as a Plus (+ -), but as you can (probably) see here, in Microsoft's whatever-font-this-is, it is too short (some call the symbol on the key next to += a "hyphen-minus", and to a Typographer it would probably be called just a "minus"), an en-dash that's the width of the letter "n" and is used, for example to indicate ranges, as in 1–20, definitely wider than a minus "-", and an em-dash that is the width of the letter "m", and is used to indicate a pause — like this (in Word, if you type two minuses, it gets turned into an Em-dash).

It turns out that typing a true minus sign is difficult, as most fonts "hide" them.  Here are hyphen, minus, en-dash, and em-dash, for your perusal and entertainment:  - − – — and here are hyphen-plus, minus-plus, and en-dash-plus, showing (I hope) that minus "matches" plus best: -+ −+ –+ .  To my (somewhat experienced) eye, the minus matches the plus the best, and the other two are both too low and either too short (hyphen) or slightly too long (en-dash).

Now, wasn't this more than you wanted to know?

Bob Schor

[T139]

Thanks for your detailed answer, although I do not understand in which regard I am right and in which I am wrong.

I know about the different types of dashes and their applications and notice when people use the wrong kind of dash for ranges, parenthesis etc. Working with tex you should, anyway. In some instances, MS Word and such help the user by changing dashes automatically accordingly, but as I don't want to take chances I usually use copypastecharacter.com or quick-access the respective characters with Alt+8722/0150/0151 etc. manually.

I am surprised that you barely ever find actual minus signs and people don't know (or care) which is all the more annoying if the text, slides etc. are supposed to be scientific. However, whenever it's not about typography and when readability is secondary to usability and convenience, hyphens seem to be used to indicate negative numbers and subtraction. Trying to use an actual minus sign on the computer usually won't get you anywhere, neither in Excel nor anywhere else.

At least in Windows you can change the 'negative sign symbol' just like you can change your 'decimal symbol' etc. Now I do not think that LV tries to detect the os-wide negative sign symbol and uses this in the help (because if it did, it should show a hyphen, i.e. '-' on my system) but rather that NI used en dashes for readibility reasons. Then again, the example tables in the help entries I mentioned above are inconsistent as en dashes are used instead of the respective 'negative sign symbol of your system' (which I suppose is usually set to hyphen). Especially when the input in the respective example is of string representation, this leads to confusion and to VI behavior that cannot be reproduced when copy&pasting the examples to your VI.

That is why I advocate that the affected help entries be edited accordingly.