# Smart quotes and dashes: the punctuation of a real book

> Curly quotes, the three dashes, the apostrophe that curls the wrong way, and the marks that must stay straight. What to type, and what the export should give.

Canonical: https://buk.press/blog/smart-quotes-and-dashes

7 September 2026 · 6 min read

A typeset book uses curly quotation marks, a real apostrophe, en dashes in number ranges and em dashes for parenthetical breaks, none of which are the characters on your keyboard. Write with straight quotes and hyphens if you like, but the export has to convert them, because straight quotes in a printed book are the single fastest way to look self-published.

There is a set of marks that separates a page that looks typeset from one that looks typed, and almost none of them are on a keyboard. A reader will not be able to name what is wrong with a page of straight quotes and hyphens-used-as-dashes. They will just find it slightly cheap, in a way they attribute to the writing.

## The marks that are not on your keyboard

Six characters do most of the work. The left column is what a keyboard gives you; the right is what a book actually uses.

| You type | A book prints | Name | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| " | “ ” | Curly double quotes | Speech and quotation |
| ' | ‘ ’ | Curly single quotes | Quotes inside quotes |
| ' | ’ | Right single quote | Every apostrophe, without exception |
| - | – | En dash | Number and date ranges |
| -- | `—` (U+2014) | Em dash | A break in a sentence |
| ... | … | Ellipsis | An omission or a trailing off |

The apostrophe is the one that matters most, because it appears several times per page. A straight vertical apostrophe in body text is visible on every line of dialogue in the book.

## Quotes: straight, curly and the wrong way round

Straight quotes are a typewriter artefact. A typewriter had one key and no room for four glyphs, so it used a vertical mark that stood in for opening quote, closing quote, apostrophe, prime and inch mark. Every one of those is a different character in real typesetting, and books have used the distinction for four hundred years.

Converting them is nearly always automatic: the renderer looks at what is on either side of the mark and picks an opening or a closing form. The place it gets this wrong is predictable, and it is the reason to check rather than trust:

- **Words that start with an apostrophe.** `'Twas`, `'tis`, `'em`, `'90s` and `rock 'n' roll` all begin with an omission, so they need a **closing** quote (’), where an automatic converter will happily give you an opening one.
- **Feet and inches.** 6′ 2″ uses prime and double prime, which are upright and slanted, not curly quotes. A house described as 30' wide with a curly quote is wrong twice.
- **Quotes inside quotes.** English nests double outside, single inside. Two adjacent closing marks (’”) get a hair of space between them in careful typesetting, and nothing at all in most.
- **Dialogue running over paragraphs.** A speech continuing into a new paragraph opens with a quote mark and does not close the previous one. Converters handle this correctly; writers often do not.

If your converter does the substitution, the way to check is not to read the manuscript. It is to export a page with dialogue on it and look at the PDF at 200%. Wrong-facing apostrophes are invisible at reading size and obvious at that magnification.

## Three dashes, three jobs

The hyphen, the en dash and the em dash are different characters with different widths and different meanings, and using one for another is the second most common giveaway after straight quotes.

| Mark | Width | Job | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyphen - | Narrow | Joins words | self-published, twenty-one |
| En dash – | Width of an n | Ranges, and "to" | pages 12–18, the London–Paris train |
| Em dash (U+2014) | Width of an m | A break in a sentence | `It worked—eventually` |

The rule for ranges is worth learning because it is unambiguous: anything you could read as "to" or "through" takes an en dash, not a hyphen. Pages 12–18. Monday–Friday. 1939–1945. A hyphen there is not a stylistic choice, it is a typo that survived.

The em dash has one genuine style decision attached to it. American practice sets it tight, with no spaces: `like—this`. British practice more often uses a spaced en dash – like this – instead. Both are correct. Mixing them in one book is not, and mixing them is what happens when a manuscript is assembled from several drafts.

Pick one and search for the other. Two minutes with find-and-replace before the final export saves the one review that mentions it.

## Ellipses, and the space around them

Three full stops in a row is not an ellipsis; it is three full stops, and a justified line will happily stretch the gaps between them until they read as four. The single ellipsis character keeps its spacing under justification, which is the whole reason it exists.

- **Inside a sentence,** an ellipsis usually takes a space on both sides: `she paused … and went on`.
- **At the end of a sentence** that trails off, it takes the ellipsis and then the full stop, if the sentence was complete.
- **Never four dots in a row** typed by hand. If you need an ellipsis and a full stop, that is one of each, in that order.
- **Never let one break across a line.** A converter that treats the character as one glyph handles this for free; three periods can and will split.

## Where straight marks must stay straight

There is one category of text where every substitution above is a bug, and it is the one that most often gets ruined: anything a reader is expected to type back in.

```
<code>const greeting = "hello"   // straight quotes: this runs
const broken   = “hello”   // curly quotes: this is a syntax error</code>
```

Code, file paths, terminal commands, URLs, regular expressions and configuration files must come out of the export with exactly the characters that went in. A renderer that applies smart punctuation inside a fenced block has produced a technical book whose examples do not run, which is why [code blocks are handled as a separate kind of content](https://buk.press/blog/markdown-code-blocks-pdf) rather than as text that happens to be monospaced.

The same goes for inline code spans. `--flag` in a sentence about a command line must stay two hyphens; converted to an em dash it becomes a flag nobody can type. If you are writing anything technical, this is the first thing to test in an export, before typefaces and margins.

## Fixing a manuscript you have already written

1. **Decide the dash style first.** Tight em dash or spaced en dash. Everything else follows from it.
2. **Search for ` - `**, a hyphen with a space on each side. In prose it is almost always a dash that was never converted.
3. **Search for `--`.** Two hyphens is a typewriter em dash and should be a real one, except inside code.
4. **Search for `...`** and replace with the ellipsis character, outside code blocks.
5. **Search for a straight apostrophe followed by a letter** at the start of a word: `'t`, `'s`, `'n`, `'9`. These are the ones an automatic converter turns the wrong way.
6. **Export and read the first page at 200%.** Quotes, apostrophes, dashes. It takes a minute and it is the only check that sees the real output.

None of this is worth doing three times, which is the argument for doing it once at the end rather than as you write. Punctuation is the last pass, after the words have stopped moving, in the same place in the sequence as [checking for widows and orphans](https://buk.press/blog/widows-and-orphans), and for the same reason: both are properties of the finished page, not of the draft.

It also puts a floor under everything else you have decided. A book with the right typeface, sensible margins and straight quotes still reads as amateur, and the reader will not know why. [The rest of the typographic basics](https://buk.press/blog/book-typography-basics) are worth having next to this one.

**About this article.** Written by the team that builds bukpress, which turns Markdown into print-ready PDF and EPUB books. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Write to [support@buk.press](mailto:support@buk.press).

## Read next

Design 30 August 2026 · 5 min read

## [Book typography for people who are not typographers](https://buk.press/blog/book-typography-basics)

Most of the gap between an amateur page and a professional one comes down to six things: line length, type size, line spacing, margins, how many typefaces you use, and whether the heading sizes form a clear hierarchy. None of them require taste to get right; they have known good ranges.

[Read it](https://buk.press/blog/book-typography-basics)

Design 3 September 2026 · 5 min read

## [Widows, orphans and the page breaks that spoil a book](https://buk.press/blog/widows-and-orphans)

A widow is the last line of a paragraph stranded alone at the top of a page. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph left alone at the bottom. Both are bad breaks, and so are a heading at the foot of a page, a split table and a broken code block. Every one of them is fixed the same way: give the typesetter permission to move the break, or edit the text until the break lands somewhere harmless.

[Read it](https://buk.press/blog/widows-and-orphans)

How-to 2 September 2026 · 6 min read

## [Code blocks in a PDF: monospace, long lines, the page edge](https://buk.press/blog/markdown-code-blocks-pdf)

Use fenced blocks, keep every line under about 80 characters, and let the typesetter hold each block on one page. Monospace type is wider than body type at the same size, so a listing fits fewer characters on a line than prose does. The fix is shorter lines in the source, not smaller type in the PDF.

[Read it](https://buk.press/blog/markdown-code-blocks-pdf)

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