+5  A: 

It's probably not a dash, it's some unicode character that looks like a dash.

Press the minus key on your keyboard and retype it.

Brian  2010-07-07 07:50:27
this may be caused by editing in another computer with different regional settings, characters, etc ?
baron  2010-07-07 07:51:17
Or maybe pasting from Word or Outlook or some app that does 'smart quotes' and turns "--" into an em dash or whatnot.
Brian  2010-07-07 08:15:17
+1  A: 

Most likely it's an en dash or em dash rather than a real hyphen or minus symbol.

Typesetters will most likely try to track you down and beat you to death if they discover you're using the wrong term :-)

paxdiablo  2010-07-07 07:53:53

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