RE: Ellipsis

From: Grosso, Gary (ggrosso@ptc.com)
Date: Mon Jan 23 2006 - 06:19:41 CST

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    While I am not sure what the implications should be for the Unicode
    standard, I have to concur with Jukka that, typographically, where there
    are four dots used, they are always evenly spaced.

    And certainly getting them that way in most software applications can be
    rather difficult.

    Countering a possible argument that they are seen evenly spaced only
    because that is the only way they could be represented with a
    typewriter, my opinion is that they would be ugly otherwise. For me,
    four unevenly-spaced dots would stand out in a page of text like a wart.

    If fonts provided 4-dot ellipses (perhaps some do), then software could
    recognize a FULL STOP + HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (or HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS +
    FULL STOP) and represent them with the 4-dot-ellipsis glyph. That feels
    rather like the right thing to do.

    It is true that adding a four dot ellipsis to the Unicode standard would
    encourage font designers to add such characters, but it is probably not
    the right thing to do.

    Best regards,
    Gary

    Jukka K. Korpela wrote, in part:

    This, however, apparently deals with spacing _around_ the four dots
    combination. What seems evident to me is that in both methods, when four
    dots are used, they should be equally spaced from each other and
    identical to each other. Admittedly this is not mentioned explicitly,
    but it is implicit in the idea of "four dots" - as opposite to referring
    to
    (three-dot) ellipsis and a full stop.



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