Watch Out! Illustrator Breaks Em Dashes

Illustrator (CS2 and CS3) has a text ren­der­ing engine near­ly as advanced as InDesign’s. For that rea­son (and because Adobe final­ly added under­lin­ing as a type option in Illustrator), more and more design­ers are using Illustrator to pro­duce com­plete single-page lay­outs they would have oth­er­wise done in InDesign. After all, if you need the supe­ri­or draw­ing tools or effects like mul­ti­ple fills and strokes that Illustrator has but InDesign does­n’t, why go back and forth between the two?

One gotcha in Illustrator to be aware of is what hap­pens to em and en dash­es at the end of a wrapped line of text. If an en dash- or em dash-separated word or clause needs to be wrapped in InDesign, that appli­ca­tion will break after the dash and wrap trail­ing words to the next line. So will Illustrator, but Illustrator con­verts the en dash or em dash to a hyphen! So, an inde­pen­dent clause becomes a com­pound word. Yuck!

Get around this quirky behav­ior by man­u­al­ly replac­ing the hyphen with a dash and a thin space. Make sure (if pos­si­ble) that all your text is set and won’t need to reflow again. Then, delete the hyphen and man­u­al­ly insert an en dash (ALT+0150 on Windows, OPT+- [Option and hyphen] on Mac) or em dash (ALT+0151 on Windows, OPT+SHIFT+- [Option and Shift and hyphen] on Mac) fol­lowed by a space. If the reg­u­lar spacebar-space is too wide, tweak its width on the Character pan­el. You can also copy a thin or punc­tu­a­tion space from InDesign and paste it into your Illustrator layout.