How can I show two dashes on Fluther?

Try putting an @ at the beginning and end of a line (with no spaces):

—basic code formatting goes here;

edit: apparently that doesn’t work for dashes. Sorry about that. Getting proper code formatting appears to be a bug. We’ll work on it.

To circumvent smart quotes, just type your post in notepad (or some equivalent) and then copy-paste it. That probably helps.

@ben, Thanks, Here’s a test of that:
somecommand—help=“Test”
(not looking good in the preview…)
Edit: Or in the result. It still broke both dashes and quotes

Not that I know of. But I agree with you. I would like to see them at least allow the <pre> tag.

@ben :: That still turns a double dash into a single one. That seems odd, but it does.

@johnpowell
Actually it turns two hyphens into an em dash.
There’s a difference, somehow.

- – Use a space and then say omit spaces? – -

no – – – that didn’t work. Two spaces between each dash is needed for them to show up.

@Fyrius True enough, I used coders terms instead of typography terms in my post though. As far as I’m concerned whether 0×2D is a “dash” or a “hyphen” is a matter of context (or just mindset)

I have run into this problem too. Sometimes I want to use a double dash/hyphen to emphasize a part of the sentence, and I wind up using space dash space instead. I don’t thin it can be done.

@escapedone7 I tried the space also, but the dashes become different sizes which is weird.

@escapedone7 That works somewhat, but the problem is when I want to write something that someone can cut and paste

I think they, the powers at be, should consider using a different symbol that is rarely used together like ++ in lieu of dashes. Just a suggestions, maybe a mod will pass it along?

As far as I’m concerned it’s madness to divide practically indistinguishable horizontal lines at middle height into different categories.

@JLeslie
That’ll be bothersome the next time anyone wants to ask anything about C++. It might prove difficult to find any convenient combination of symbols that nobody ever wants to use.

@Fyrius I agree with you there – if anyone Really needs an en or em dash, let them paste it in themselves, it all supports unicode right? :-)

Like this: – -

Testing “quotes” pasted in instead of typed.
Edit: Nope.

Hold on a sec… Hyphen: - and "Quotes"
Ha! I forgot it supports html entities. The above line is like this:
Hold on a sec… Hyphen: &#45; and &quot;Quotes&quot;

I am totally in sympathy with the resistance to automatic formatting. There’s simply no workaround when you just want to write certain things literally. (a) Sometimes I really want to add extra spaces or an indent. (b) Sometimes I can’t format links properly within sentences because of punctuation overrides. And© sometimes I just want to say (left parenthesis) (lowercase letter c) (right parenthesis) without having it turn into a copyright symbol that obliterates the space I really did type in front of it.

@davidgro
“Testing “quotes” pasted in instead of typed.
Edit: Nope.”
Hm. Bummer.

I don’t get smart quotes either way, actually, as you can see. I’m posting from Ubuntu. I think it’s an operating system-specific issue that has little to do with Fluther.

@Jeruba
I© what you did there.
But try this: if you type two spaces in front of it, it’s just (c) instead of©.

@Fyrius I wonder if they could program it so if you use an apostrophe before the symbol it will negate the formating, similar to using excel. For example ’—would type out simply as a double dash.

@JLeslie
They probably could. Good idea.

The only solution I can think of at this point is to provide a link to someplace else where the code is posted appropriately. For example writing it out on your own blog, then providing the link to the answer.

@escapedone7 :: There is http://pastebin.com/. But we really need a {code} tag. This has actually been bitched about for a long time. It needs to get fixed.

@Fyrius
> ‘I’m posting from Ubuntu. I think it’s an operating system-specific issue that has little to do with Fluther.’

I doubt it, I’m using Firefox which should act the same on any OS, but I’ll try it when I get home, on Kubuntu – with the various browsers I have there.

@escapedone7 I did find a solution above, perhaps you missed it: HTML Character Entities, the things like &#45; for a hyphen and &quot; for a double quote – I forgot to add &#39; for a ' (Apostrophe) and when Writing about them (as I am doing here) &amp; is &
(If course when typing this the first one if those is &amp;amp; And if course the one before “And” here needed three amp;‘s…)

More tests, From Kubuntu 9.10, Pasting in:
“Quotes” – Firefox 3.5.9
“Quotes” – Konqueror 4.4.2
“Quotes” – Chromium 5.0.379.0 (44736)
Typed normally: “Quotes”. – Firefox
It looks like Firefox is not showing them as smartquotes, but they really are. For proof, copy and paste them, or just zoom in enough (using ctrl-=, and then ctrl-0 to reset, or ctrl—to zoom-out) – so it’s just a font difference.

@davidgro
I’ll be darned, they are smart quotes.
Well, I stand corrected.

@Fyrius, you’re right, and I have found workarounds for some of those automatic formats. It still vexes me that the software presumes to read my mind and won’t let me say “Just do it the way I wrote it, dammit.” Especially since those formatting rules came along after I’d been a member here for a while, so I know we can do without them. I’d like it to be opt-in rather than opt-out: tell me how to make a© if I want one, but let it remain just a (c) unless otherwise specified.

Besides, why should a copyright symbol appear without a space before it? If I did want a copyright symbol, I would also want the space so I didn’t look ignorant.

@Jeruba
Fun fact: I found out about this circumvention by trying to do just that.

And that is when you just copy-paste the © symbol from somewhere else, as we already do for every other symbol.
You’re right, nobody would miss it if we didn’t have those automatic symbol making methods. I can already make a © with ctrl + ( + c anyway.

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why wont this answer
[changing coding didn’t work]