LaTeX - What kinds of dashes and hyphens are available with LaTeX?

LaTeX FAQ: What kinds of dashes and hyphens are available with LaTeX?

There are three types of dashes you can create with LaTeX:

• A dash between words, like "near-perfect".
• A slightly larger (medium) dash, good for number ranges, is created with two hyphens, like 1--10.
• The largest dash is the "punctuation dash", and you use three consecutive dashes to create it, something like this: "He came in the room --- but wait, he heard something."

If you'll use these three dashes in your documents, LaTeX will convert them to slightly different dash characters in your documents.