En dash vs hyphen

Leigh

We are experiencing problems with the Helvetica Neue font in generating htmls from dcrs - when entering hyphen, it becomes an en-dash. We only want a hyphen to appear, not an en-dash. Is there a way to enforce the hyphen to stay as a hyphen? Or alternatively, is there a font closest to Helvetica Neue that is more standard?
Any information will be greatly appreciated.

tonyarnold

Well, you could try just using Helvetica, or even better sans-serif, but I take it by the fact you're discussing ens and ems that you have a design background, and that probably won't cut it. Try looking at this page:

http://www.designerstoolbox.com/online/special.php

They make reference to the ASCII HTML equivalent to a hyphen, which should ensure that it remains as a hyphen. It sounds to me like maybe your presentation scripts include something like John Gruber's SmartyPants (a script that converts standard quotes in curly quotes, double dashes in em-dashes etc).

In saying all that, are you absolutely sure that it is producing an en-dash, and that it's not just a browser/HTML quirk?