Is there a special hyphen-symbol to be used between capital letters?

Question

In words consisting of small letters, the - hyphen seems right. In words (abbreviations, acronyms) consisting of capital letters, the common hyphen appears (at least imho) to be placed too low and to be too short (and en-dash too long). Is there a "capital-letter-hyphen-command"? (And what to use as hyphen between small and capital letters?) MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
pole-axe versus CD-ROM versus FamouseMusicGroup-CD versus A-side
\end{document}

At least the hyphen in CD-ROM looks "wrong" to me.

\usepackage{graphicx}
\newcommand{\capitalhyphen}{\raisebox{0.24ex}{\resizebox{0.4em}{\height}{-}}\kern-0.07em}

would be possible, but I assume that there is already a solution to this, isn't it?

top line: -

bottom line: \capitalhyphen

• pole-axe - is OK
• CD-ROM needs \capitalhyphen (or the command to use in this case)
• FamouseMusicGroup-CD neither - nor \capitalhyphen seem to be ideal, but - is acceptable
• A-side - is OK

Answer 1

I would say the typographically correct thing would be to use small caps for all-capital letter words, for example CD-ROM would become \textsc{cd-rom}:

That way, the hyphen is aligned nicely with the surrounding letters, and the all-caps word doesn't stand out as much. This is also the solution suggested by Erik Spiekerman in his Typo Tips.

Answer 2

I am not sure that it needs to be longer than the normal size. Consider the following:

As you will observe the hyphen is as wide as one of the narrow letters. However, if you still looking to have it a bit wider you can consider to pick it up from a different font (the width varies with fonts) or select it from a larger size. (Image from wikipedia).

But perhaps the best advice is to use small caps as noted by Jake in the comments.

Answer 3

Vertical alignment of rules is always a difficult matter in typography. Looking at this,

you might feel the horizontal strokes of B and e are not properly aligned. Rotis has a (radically?) different approach:

But it's really a matter of taste.

In my opinion, the negative effect of hyphens "jumping" vertically between different words is worse than that of hyphens looking slightly vertically misplaced for capitals.

Answer 4

Not sure if I understand your question the right way, but why don't you use the -- command as hyphen between words.

There are three types of hyphen

• - to split words
• -- to combine different words, e.g. CD-ROM
• --- to seperate two sentences from each other

Here is a short example in the same order: