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Citing Biblical References with an En Dash Rather a Figure Dash


Alan Kurschner

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Whenever I copy a Biblical text for citation or reference and paste it to a document, I end up having a figure dash rather than the proper en dash between my numbered references. For example:

 

Figure Dash:

Acts 1:1-2

 

En Dash:

Acts 1:1
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That is unfortunate. Every time I copy and paste a Biblical reference I have to manually change the hyphen to an en dash, and it is not always easy to remember to change it so I end up having inconsistent styles.

 

It is just standard to have en dashes for indicating ranges. I cannot imagine that it would be difficult to fix this problem in the next program update.

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...I have to manually change the hyphen to an en dash...
Alan, I have also thought for some time that the en dash output option would be a great addition. Note that an en dash works in the search box.

However, please tell me you're not manually changing lots of these... a simple one step replace all would take care of it in one fell swoop.

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One more vote for correct en dashes!

 

and another vote. This could be an option that is toggled in the citation preferences.

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I have two thoughts about this thread:

 

1. I don't see why we would need to make this a user option. We should probably just change it to an en dash.

 

2. This is proof positive that Accordance users expect more than the users of any other Bible software program. While other programs' users are trying to figure out how to get around the lack of a print command(!), our users are asking for en dashes. It's that attention to detail which helps drive our attention to detail.

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I would think a user option would be safest for "backwards compatibility" of years of output. It won't upset me either way, but I wonder if it would some.

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David: thanks!

 

Joe: I can't do a "replace all" since there are legitimate hyphens in the document that are not used for a range. I suppose I could do a "replace" and go through the document for each item. At any rate, glad to see that it made David's attention.

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I can't do a "replace all"
Hi Alan,

You wouldn't, of course, blindly change all hyphens to en dashes, but how many of those you wouldn't want to change also fall in between two numbers? Any word processor will allow you to only replace those hyphens with en dashes that fall between two digits. For instance, in Word 2004, you could do it like this:

Find what string: ([0-9])-([0-9])

Replace with: \1

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Joe, thanks for the helpful tip. Yes, I use Word 2004. And thanks for the notice on your site about Microsoft discontinuing their updates.

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That's a clever trick with Word. Can you tell me how to do the same in QuarkXPress? I have to do ten separate "find and replace" searches to cover all the possible permutations of hyphen and number.

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  • 3 months later...

8.3 is great! Thanks for the update. I was surprised to see though that the hyphen for verse and chapter ranges was not corrected to the standard style for ranges, which is the em dash.

 

I mean to say: "which is the en dash"

 

8.3 is great! Thanks for the update. I was surprised to see though that the hyphen for verse and chapter ranges was not corrected to the standard style for ranges, which is the em dash.

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