\dash inordinately triggers overfull violations

[chbrown]

\dash, which is how it's used in most cases, and it's used quite a lot, really doesn't like to line-break before the following word. I agree that line-breaking directly after should be avoided, but there's not the same potential for ambiguity as with a single hyphen, and I think avoiding "overfull \hbox" should be a much greater priority.

\dash{} resolves this, allowing line breaks directly after the spaced em-dash (with the em-dash flush right against the margin, so that's good). Is there a way to get \dash to act the same in both cases? Would a simple \xspace do the trick?

[fintelkai]

Can you experiment with this? The \dash macro achieves the important goal of having just a smidgen of space around the em-dash. If we can get the line-breaking to work without messing up normal intra-line occurrences, I'm fine with a modification.