New to Typophile? Accounts are free, and easy to set up.
Annoying Gmail bug, anyone else notice it? It won't let me type en/em dashes.
Posted by Zach in
8 Apr 2011 — 11:17am
8 Apr 2011 — 11:17am
Most of the time Gmail lets me insert whatever characters I want into the subject or body of an email, but about a quarter of the time, it simply refuses to accept en or em dashes, and I have to revert to hyphens. It's so annoying, and it seems to do this at random.
This has been bugging me for ages, and I figured some other typophile here must have run into the same thing.
Other deets: It doesn't matter whether I'm in plain vs. rich text mode, or replying vs. composing anew. I don't know if it also would prevent me from inserting other nonstandard glyphs, but I'm guessing it would. (I tried to check just now, but it's not doing it right now.) I'm on a Mac, using Firefox. I tried finding an answer via google, but no luck.
User login
Support our Sponsors
9 Apr 2011 — 3:11pm
I can't reproduce it, works ok for me. I wish I had a mac to try to figure it out. In windows you can manually type alt+0151 but on a mac it looks like you do these via an onscreen keyboard... or do you? How do you usually enter it?
9 Apr 2011 — 4:42pm
Don't you just love troubleshooting glitches that seem to happen completely at random? The first thing that comes to mind is that Gmail uses shortcut access keys (and a metric ton of javascript), but that alone isn't much to hint at the problem.
Which methods have you tried using to enter the characters — Option key shortcuts, character palette, copy/paste from another app? When the bug occurs, have you tested to make sure that those characters work elsewhere in Firefox? Does restarting have any effect? Are you using any extensions or user scripts related to Gmail, or that might affect key bindings?
14 Apr 2011 — 7:50pm
Hi guys –
Thanks for the ideas, I'm waiting until it next happens to test them...
(I'm using option shortcuts, very few extensions, and it doesn't seem to affect any other part of Firefox, but I'll double check next time it happens. I'll also try restarting, but considering how many tabs I keep open, I hope I can figure out a better solution.)
Zach