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The marks that are not letters, and why so many of them look alike.
Also known as: Punctuation marks, Typography symbols, Marks that are not letters
Dashes, quotes, primes, spaces and ornaments. The recurring problem is not knowing what a mark means but knowing which mark it is: several pairs are visually near-identical, encoded separately, and treated differently by search, sorting and line-breaking.
The non-alphabetic marks used in setting text: punctuation proper, spacing characters, reference marks and printers' ornaments.
There is no regulator. Unicode fixes which character a mark is and says nothing about when to use it; style authorities prescribe usage and disagree with one another, so a difference between British and American practice is house style rather than error.
Asking what a mark 'should' be usually has two correct answers depending on which side of the Atlantic the publisher is.
The distinctions that cause real trouble are between characters that look nearly the same: hyphen against en dash against minus, straight quote against curly quote against prime, hyphen against soft hyphen. Each pair sorts, searches and breaks lines differently.
Small marks set among letters: short and long horizontal strokes, paired curved or straight ticks, raised dots and ornamental leaf shapes.
The em dash is one of the marks in this system.