| English-language style guides all but invariably state no spaces around em-dashes. Style guides are bullshit on this point. Checking just now, the AP style guide does specify spaces around em dashes, so if you want a justification, claim you're using AP ems. <https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html> See also Merriam-Webster's guidance, though MW fall to the Dark Side: <https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/em-dash-en-das...> As for plain text, I follow LaTeX conventions (and some Markdown flavours) in which a single '-' is a hyphen, a doubled '--' is an en-dash (used for numeric ranges, e.g., 1917--1991), and a triple dash '---' indicates an em dash. Put spaces around your em dashes. Real human readers will thank you. As well as the stray space alien cat. |