zlacker

>>tkgall+(OP)
I started using emdashes in my academic career, after my advisor pointed me to the subtle differences. And since then, I like and use emdash a lot. In Latex, it is easily produced, just keep the spacing rules in mind. The Punctuation Guide is a nice reference on it https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/

>>astahl+1d
There are actually four different "dashes" in La/TeX. The hyphen (-), en-dash (--) which is used for numeric rangen like 1--2, the em-dash (---) for punctuation, and the minus sign ($-$). Knuth talks about them in the TeXbook which is good fun.

>>globul+bf
I think you can do all of those in plain text as well. There are Unicode characters for those dashes and probably more

>>pxc+Zf
Not in ASCII. My definition of plain text is roughly "the characters I have on my keyboard". Unicode is like a superset of all possible plain texts. Useful, but I really don't like my own files containing characters I can't (easily) type. If I regularly typed in another language I would acquire a keyboard for that language. I'm not even convinced typographical symbols like various dash types even belong in Unicode at all to be honest. It seems like you have to draw a very arbitrary line somewhere.

>>globul+Hl
Drawing the line at "OK-ish for American English" is far too restrictive.

You can't write CO₂ or m², use a fraction like ½, claim © or mention a price in Euros or Pounds Sterling.

You can't even write major American place names (San José, Oʻahu).

>>Symbio+Mm
I'm pretty sure © and ½ are in ASCII. I think é might be, too.

But anyway, I agree: there's no reason plain text shouldn't be rich.