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Dialogue

The dialog shortcut formats conversation in the Continental em-dash style — each turn opens with an em-dash instead of quotation marks. Write a plain Markdown bullet list inside the block; each - becomes one turn:

::: dialog
- Who's there?
- Just the wind.
- At this hour?
:::

In PDF each turn renders with an em-dash; in EPUB and HTML it becomes an em-dash-prefixed paragraph. The block gets breathing room above and below, and inner lines aren't first-line-indented.

Wrapped turns

By default a turn that wraps onto more lines flows back to the body margin (tight). Set style="hanging" to indent the continuation under the speech instead, which makes turn boundaries pop when turns are long:

::: {.dialog style="hanging"}
- Hello? She paused, listening for any sound at all from the hallway, some
  footstep or shifting weight, anything to confirm she had heard correctly.
- It's me.
:::
  • style — hanging adds a hanging indent on wrapped lines; omit it (or use default) for the tight, flush-left wrap.

Prose dialogue

This shortcut is only for the dash-led convention. Conventional quotation-mark dialogue needs no special markup — write it as ordinary prose and it typesets normally.