Bill D -

The trick for separating those closely spaced characters is to set your cursor at one end and see how many clicks of the arrow key it takes to get across the suspect character or character group. It's sometimes easier to see if you hold down the shift key to "select" as you step across.

DaveO -

With default Autocorrect setup in many current word processors, if you type two hyphens, the program will automatically change it when you type the next character - or sometimes when you type the first space following where you dropped the dashes.

Formally, the correct typographical names for the "dashes" are "hyphen," "en dash," and "em dash." For typographic purposes, the "hyphen" is identical to the "minus" character, although a very few typefaces have separate glyphs.

The key on your keyboard should insert a hyphen "-".

In Word, if you type a space, with a hyphen following it, Autocorrect should convert the hyphen to an en dash "–" if you have Autocorrect turned on.

In Word, if you type two hyphens, with no space between the preceding character and the first dash, Autocorrect should replace them with an em dash "—".

The Chicago Manual of Style shows approximately 54 entries on proper usage of the em dash, but only about 18 citations for usage of the simpler en dash. Approximately 20 citations are shown for the hyphen, but there is a separate section with about the same number of entries under "hyphenation."

The hyphen is ASCI character 045, and can be inserted in html, as in a post here, by typing "-".
The n-dash is ASCI character 150, and can be inserted in html, as in a post here, by typing "–".
The m-dash is ASCI character 151, and can be inserted in html, as in a post here, by typing "—".

Typographers also include a "2-em dash" and a "3-em dash." The 2-em dash may be used to indicate missing letters in text, but the 3-em dash should be used to indicate missing whole words. The 3-em dash may also be used in bibliographies to indicate the same author as a preceding entry.

There isn't a "quick-key" method for typing 2-em and 3-em dashes, but since the em dash fills the glyph cell, two em dashes in a row should leave no gap, and is equivalent to the 2-em, etc.. So far as I've been able to find, even the Unicode standard doesn't give you characters for the 2-em and 3-em, so the might better be call 2 ems and 3 ems(?). But that's not how they talk about them.

For most formal manuscript work (i.e. ms. for book publishing) you usually can type one or two hyphens almost anywhere, and the galley proofers should mark each and every dash to show the layout people "what kind of dash" goes in each place. If you're lucky, they'll be better at it than you want to be. The typesetter should never have to guess.

John