I'm writing prose in AsciiDoc and I've run into a bit of a puzzle: on occasion, I find myself writing interrupted dialog, and so want to end that bit of dialog with an em dash. I'm using curly quotes for my dialog, so it looks something like this in AsciiDoc syntax:
"`What are you --`"
I'm expecting it to render like this:
“What are you —”
But instead, I get:
“What are you --”
When the em dash appears in the middle of a sentence, white space is necessary on each side of the --, so I thought that might be the same case here. But if I try adding white like so:
"`What are you -- `"
Then the curly quotes break and their AsciiDoc syntax is emitted literally:
"`What are you — `"
The only solution I've been able to find is using the escape sequence for the em dash:
"`What are you —`"
To finally render properly as:
“What are you —”
But that's pretty annoying to have to remember and makes the raw text that much more clunky. Any other options?
You can put {empty} right after the dash to simulate a non-whitespace character to satisfy the parser without actually producing a character in the output.