Re: Empty set

> I dd not speak about inter-word spacing (this cont affect the
> rendering of ellipsis itself) but about inter-letter spacing.
But the context I provided was that some people ask for ". . .[ .]", as
ugly as it is :-) And, again, the precise "ideal" spacing is a matter of
typographic design; you can probably deal with this via kerning tables.

> Once you've increased the width of these interword spaces to their
> maximum, all the characters (and these increased spaces) should be
> justified using interletter spacing, and this extra interletter
> spacing should be applied as well between the dots of the ellipsis
> (showing that they are effectively 3 separate characters and not just
> one with a fixed distance between dots).
You are right that tracking and glyph scaling exist, but how exactly
they should be applied to a 3- or 4-dot ellipsis is likely a matter of
font design and typographic style. What you write isn't unreasonable,
but I don't buy it as an absolute prescription. (If it were one, that'd
be an argument against a single-glyph ellipsis.)

> If one wants to really avoid this expansion of ellipsis during
> justification (cases that should be rarely desired), we could use
> <period,ZWJ,period,ZWJ,period>, possibly surrounded with (unbreakable)
> fixed-width narrow spaces, to hint their behavior as a single
> (unbreakable) ligature. But may be this is the (rare) usage intended
> by the single-character ELLIPSIS (but we know the caveats of this
> character if it is mapped with a single glyph in monospaced fonts)
Maybe ... and the origin of the single-glyph ellipsis remains a mystery
to me.

Stephan
Received on Fri Sep 13 2013 - 05:14:48 CDT