Re: not applicable character

Brian wrote:

On the printed menu, there is a
long dash in the "price by the glass" column to indicate that there is
no applicable entry. Any thoughts on what I should use? m-dash?

If there is no applicable entry, do you really need one at all?

Thor

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"Thor Kottelin" <thor (AT) anta (DOT) net> wrote

Brian wrote:
On the printed menu, there is a
long dash in the "price by the glass" column to indicate that there is
no applicable entry. Any thoughts on what I should use? m-dash?

If there is no applicable entry, do you really need one at all?

It's a good indicator that the entry should not exist as opposed to
wondering if it was mistakenly left off. Much like in documentation where it
says, "This page intentionally left blank."

As to the OP's original question, I'm certainly not sure on the "definite"
answer. I'd probably just use an ndash or mdash.

Jonathan


--
http://www.snook.ca/

"Jonathan Snook" <goto_www.snook.ca (AT) snook (DOT) ca> wrote:

On the printed menu, there is a
long dash in the "price by the glass" column to indicate that
there is no applicable entry. Any thoughts on what I should
use? m-dash?

If there is no applicable entry, do you really need one at all?

It's a good indicator that the entry should not exist as opposed to
wondering if it was mistakenly left off. Much like in documentation
where it says, "This page intentionally left blank."

Indeed, and in HTML documents, there are additional reasons too.
Empty cells cause technical problems in rendering, and they might be
confusing in speech rendering. More on empty cells and their problems:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/emptycells.html

As to the OP's original question, I'm certainly not sure on the
"definite" answer. I'd probably just use an ndash or mdash.

In a wine list in English, <i>N/A</i> would probably be the clearest
way, perhaps with a footnote that explains the notation.

I would not use any dash or hyphen, because there is a widespread
convention in statistical tables that a hyphen indicates an exact value
of zero. (It's more zero that 0 or 0.0, which indicate just a value
that is zero when rounded to the precision used.) Those conventions
typically use "." to indicate 'not applicable' (and ".." or "..." to
indicate 'data not available'). See e.g.
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mbs/symbols.asp
But if you use a dash-like character, I would suggest the em dash,
since it deviates more from a hyphen, thereby reducing the risk of
confusion.

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Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote in
news:Xns94106B3D84089jkorpelacstutfi (AT) 193 (DOT) 229.0.31:

I would not use any dash or hyphen, because there is a widespread
convention in statistical tables that a hyphen indicates an exact value
of zero. (It's more zero that 0 or 0.0, which indicate just a value
that is zero when rounded to the precision used.) Those conventions

I assume you mean a "structural zero," as in "number of male subjects who
became pregnant."

Eric Bohlman <ebohlman (AT) earthlink (DOT) net> wrote:

I assume you mean a "structural zero," as in "number of male subjects who
became pregnant."

Arnold?

Eric Bohlman <ebohlman (AT) earthlink (DOT) net> wrote:

I would not use any dash or hyphen, because there is a widespread
convention in statistical tables that a hyphen indicates an exact
value of zero. (It's more zero that 0 or 0.0, which indicate just
a value that is zero when rounded to the precision used.) Those
conventions

I assume you mean a "structural zero," as in "number of male
subjects who became pregnant."

I think that would be rather be "." 'not applicable', whereas
"-" might indicate the total number of pregrancies in a hi-tech company
where people are just too busy to reproduce. It's a bit debatable, of
course, whether male pregnancy is logically impossible (hence N/A) or
just currently a low frequency (exact zero, to be exact) phenomenon.

ObHTML: In principle, you could use
<abbr title="Not Applicable">N/A</abbr>
or
<span title="Not applicable">.</span>
to explain the notations. But in practice, that will hardly help - the
notations should be explained explicitly, unless the audience can be
expected to be familiar with them.

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Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html