dash, hyphen, hyphen-minus, minus-sign

Reading time:

1–2 minutes

Computers can display a wide variety of characters. Sometimes it can be confusing to identify exactly which character is being shown, as many look very similar.

I recently encountered this very issue. It involved a simple dash connecting two numbers, for example “1-4.” At least, I assumed it was a simple dash. In reality, there are many different types of dashes, and this can become a problem when converting a document to PDF.

Below is a brief overview, just so you can see the differences: