documenting subtraction

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.fremont.ca.us
Fri Nov 25 22:54:31 EST 2016


> On Nov 25, 2016, at 6:09 PM, Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Hi John,
>  
> The punctuation guide [1] you kindly pointed me too recently does not mention using hyphens in mathematical formulas AFAICS.
> In the guide selling section is uses:
> GROSS_SALE-TOTALBUY-COMMISSION
> and I would like to change that to
> GROSS_SALE - TOTALBUY – COMMISSION   (spaces around hyphen)
> OK?
>  
> [1] http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/about-this-guide.html <http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/about-this-guide.html>
Chris,

Yeah, punctuation generally means "natural language" rather than "math" (or "maths" if you prefer). I do think it's normal in typesetting formulae to have spaces around operators and I agree that it makes the formula more readable in this case.

BUT don't use the text you used here: There's an en-dash (U+2013) between TOTALBUY and COMMISSION.

As I've told you before, the typographically correct symbol to use is − (U+2212, −)) but the ASCII hyphen-minus - (U+002d) that you used between GROSS_SALE and TOTALBUY is commonly used and is fine. Whichever you use should be the same at least on the whole page.

Regards,
John Ralls




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