[MikeTheGreat]

genuine question: How could you tell they were em-dashes?

Like, I could see some people noticing that the book they're reading has dashes that are a bit longer than normal, but what made you think "That must be it's own thing, separate from a normal dash" as opposed to something like "In this font the dashes are very long"?

[nagaiaida]

well, hyphenation will most likely insert a lot of regular dashes for easy comparison to rule out "this font is blessed with uncommonly long dashes" and the differing uses of both en and em dashes will cluster along grammatical lines (with em dashes separating clauses and en dashes relating concepts or bounds) which ought to eventually make it clear even to someone who initially bins those together separate from hyphens.

[pinusc]

If you know the difference between em dash, en dash, and hyphen, you start seeing it everywhere—whether thet are used correctly or not. Books tend to have correct typesetting, so if you see a dash used as an em dash ought to be used, and if it looks kinda long, you can assume it's an em dash. AFAIK often manuscripts are submitted either with hyphens or --- in place of em dashes and then the editor or typesetter fixes it.

Also, it's called em dash because it's as long as the letter m (as a rule of thumb), so it's usually an easy visual comparison. Finally, a typeface with hyphens as long as em dashes would be terrible and quite noticeably wrong!

[Iuz]

He uses it a lot, so it didn’t take long for me to notice that the dash was longer than usual. At that point, it felt less like a font quirk and more like a deliberate stylistic choice. I also recall that one of the translators mentioned his use of dashes.