Unclothed dashes

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• Definition: Unclothed dashes are those en-dashes, em-dashes, or long dashes that occur at the beginning or end of a line or otherwise have a space on either side of them. They are considered "naked" or "unclothed" because they do not have the previous or next word snugged up against them.

• Instruction: Remove any spaces on either side of a dash unless it is a dash used to fill in for a missing word or if it is an en-dash (represented by a hyphen in proofed text) that is used as an arithmetic operator. If a dash appears at the start or end of a line of the OCR text, join it with the adjacent line so that there are no spaces or line breaks around it. Only if the author used a dash to start or end the paragraph or line of poetry or dialog should you leave it at the start or end of a line. This is commonly referred to as clothing a dash (or hyphen).

• Why? Words, spaces, and dashes need to be joined so that when the Post-Processing is done and all line breaks are removed and replaced with a space and the text is re-wrapped, there are no odd or unusual spacing problems.

For an example, see Proofing Examples.