Not for most English manuscript format standards. Each house, though, has its own specialized stipulations and exceptions driven by cultural drift, which is even more pronounced since the introduction of desktop publishing.bcomet wrote:Thanks Polymath. That's helpful to learn.
Are you situated in the USA or are you primarily focused abroad? I ask because I wonder if there is a difference in styles.
One example, a digital digest house I know requires three hyphens for the em dash dashed interruption. That way their digital typesetter can do a simple search and replace of the three hyphens with the em dash character entity, --- — or — Once and done. The en dash, two hyphens, which is prescriptively for joining numbers of a series in table publication format and reads as "to" or "through," i.e., 1982--2010.
The two-hyphen standard for manuscripts is the standard at most houses though. Then there's the transcript reporter's dash, which unlike the manuscript dash is bracketed with spaces. Manuscript dash--two hyphens, no spaces. Reporter's dash -- two hyphens bracketed with single word spaces. Still, simple search and replace once and done for digital typesetting, paper or digital publication.