MultiMarkdown 6 offers en-dash and em-dash via two or three hyphens:
However in DEVONthink this does not seem to work anymore. (I am certain that it did in the past.)
I am using DT 4.1.1 – Is this a setting I got wrong?
Development would have to assess that.
Why don’t you just type actual en and em-dashes?
one - hyphen (minus key)
two – en dash (Option-minus)
three — em dash (Shift-Option-minus)
Thanks for chiming in @BLUEFROG.
Habit. I always and everywhere where I can use -- and --- in Markdown documents. Even in you forum I can use this! 
I’ve actually never heard of anyone doing this. And my background is graphic arts and printing so my habit is the standard typesetting method.
A previous short thread on this:
I guess I’m getting old 
Not only you 
It‘s probably an optional Multimarkdown feature that hasn‘t been enabled so far, we‘ll check this.
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Funny. I just read an article (BBC? NYT?) in defense of using m-dashes 
And to add to the mirth… While not conclusive, use of many em dashes may be a sign of AI composed responses.
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To my knowledge quite a number of people use -- and --- for dashes, just not only in rendered Markdown. Isn’t this a feature of macOS/iOS’ smart typography? At least it is possible to use text replacement for this purpose. (I’m not sure which one because for German, my native language, the implementation is only half-baked, so I’m using Typinator to provide the proper dash solution.)
This is very subjective. Outside my printing days, I would easily say less than 20% of people I know would regularly use en or em dashes.
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If you come from a typesetting environment, typing en and em dash seems natural. But if your background is something else, you probably don’t even know where these characters are on the keyboard. Or they were not easily accessible for a long time. So, relying on something “smart” might seem natural.
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Or you do not even consider using different hyphens like me 
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Ah, these archaic delights…
I was talking about people which do use dashes, quite a number of them seem to use multiple hyphens to get dashes. And that is of course subjective; as subjective as your experience.
But that was not my point: I was wondering why the conversion should be left for the Markdown rendering (same with quotation marks, by the way), when the OS is already offers a—more or less convincing—solution.
And I do love dashes—or should I rather say parenthesis?
For my understanding it is a standard Multimarkdown feature. The current Multimarkdown documentation isn’t totally clear, but when using multimarkdown with no options it does render -- as en-dash:
$ echo "**bold** -- or not" | multimarkdown
<p><strong>bold</strong> – or not</p>
(This is with Multimarkdown V6.6.)
Having Smart Typography switched on, does not stop anybody using either the OS text replacement or a keyboard shortcut for the Unicode character _in the source).
But other people who want to stick to ACII in the source will like the Smart typography.
I think there are two issues here. 1) Use of en and em dashes 2) Rendering multiple hyphens as dashes as per multimarkdown.
Anyone who uses LaTeX will use two hyphens for en-dash. It’s baked in. This is supplemented by iOS etc doing it for years as an autocorrect.. so yes please. Been using LaTeX since the 1990s and this would trip me up (I even knew the option key worked but that’s much less simple to type, especially using dvorak layout as I do).
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This can be enabled in Settings > Editing under Substitutions: Smart dashes?
Any progress on this one? (As mentioned I understand it is a standard feature in Multimarkdown 6.)