Sometimes there’s beauty in little errors, or even a genius idea waiting to be unearthed. Take this little typo:

“Emcoding”, heh heh…

But wait! We do have en-dashes and em-dashes in typography, why not introduce en-coding and em-coding? The world of charsets and encodings is daunting and confusing already, adding more technical terms to the mix surely can’t hurt!

En-coding

• Typographic counterpart: – (en-dash)
• Narrow: denotes a single-byte encoding
• ASCII, EBCDIC, PETSCII

Em-coding

• Typographic counterpart: — (em-dash)
• Wide: each codepoint encodes to n bytes
• UCS-2, UTF-32

Swung-coding

• Typographic counterpart: ⁓ (swung-dash)
• Byte lengths are swinging back and forth
• UTF-8, Big5

To be honest, I didn’t know about the swung-dash before. Maybe that’s stretching the pun too far…? The emd. :)