Hyphen Sporadically Appearing In Enumerated List

Question

I am having an issue with hyphens not appearing in an enumerated list using IEEEtran. Sometimes the hyphen will present correctly, and other times it will not appear at all. Here is a working example:

\documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{justification=centering}
\ifCLASSINFOpdf
   \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\else
\fi
\begin{document}
\subsection{Section} \label{section}
\begin{enumerate}
    \item \emph{Item} - Initial stuff.
    \item \emph{Item 2} – Here is some stuff.
    \begin{itemize}
        \item Stuff
        \item Stuff
    \end{itemize}
    \item \emph{Item 3} - More stuff
    \item \emph{Item 4} – Also stuff
\end{enumerate}
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\end{document}

And the outcome:

I'm at a loss for why this is happening.

Answer 1

assuming your file is UTF8 encoded the log file shows

Missing character: There is no  in font ptmr7t!
Missing character: There is no  in font ptmr7t!
Missing character: There is no  in font ptmr7t!

as you have not told latex you are using UTF-8, so it sees a dash as three separate characters from its three bytes. All of them have the 8th bit set and the classic OT1 encoding used by default has no characters with that bit set. (ie above 127).

If you add

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

then the dash works, the single - still makes a hyphen though and should be -- to make an n-dash.