An actual e-mail I had to send at work, about the hyphen’s bastard cousin from hell, the en-dash
“Hi [redacted name of my supervisor at work]
Apparently I've committed the cardinal offence of using hyphens in the completed figures, were as if I'd looked carefully at the brief, I'd have seen that what [redacted name of senior member of my company] used in his example text were in fact en-dashes, despite the fact that the instructions made no mention of using en-dashes, and I was supposed to somehow know just by glancing at the example text with my superhuman micrometer eyes. Apparently, a hyphen is unacceptable in the context of this publication. Ten minutes of googling and learning more than I've ever wanted to know about typesetting, I now, at age [redacted but in 30′s], know what an en-dash is for the first time in my life. Behold, the chad — vs the virgin -
Is there a more efficient way to find and replace hyphens with en-dashes in [redacted name of software I use] other than just copy-pasting the one example en-dash I've spawned, or is this going to be as tedious as I fear it is?
Yours, [redacted]” I now have to recreate dozens of figures for publication from scratch because some manager wants to give his hyphens a bloody penis-enlargement. I’m tempted to just make them all em-dashes to fuck with him.