OK volunteers, but please leave long dashes intact in any submissions to Bookshare, or during editing/approval sessions. That is, please do not convert long-dashes in TXT or RTF submissions into single or double-dashes. In modern typesetting, long-dashes are used to delimit subordinate clauses, or in lieu of elipsis at the end of quoted sentences. Short dashes are used for createing compound words. The two are used in different ways for prosodic flow by TTS engines. Double short-dashes are the country cousins of long-dashes: They have the same meaning as long dashes but look ugly. A conversion from long-dashes to an appropriate braille symbol should be performed instead by the Bookshare tool which creates the BRF output files for Braille users. If the conversion tool does an inadequate job in this area, it should be fixed. Regards, Guido Thanks, Guido Guido D. Corona IBM Accessibility Center, Austin Tx. IBM Research, Phone: (512) 838-9735 Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx Visit my weekly Accessibility WebLog at: http://www-3.ibm.com/able/weblog/corona_weblog.html Rick Roderick Sent by: 09/28/2004 02:46 PM Please respond to bookshare-discuss To bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx cc Subject [bookshare-discuss] Re: What is an M-dash The em-dash symbol is one to avoid in braille. Word, by default, were turn two hyphens into it. It can be turned off in the format menu and options. In braille, I believe it comes out, in some translators, as a single hyphen. Rick Roderick, Louisville, KY richard@xxxxxxxxx