ellipses, with or without spaces?
 

How do you guys handle ellipses?

I find the ones provided by the entity/fonts are too closely spaced; it hardly looks like an ellipsis to me. That could be because I'm used to seeing the three periods separated by full spaces. And if I do use them then using full spaces before or after makes them look even more squashed.

At the moment I'm trying a sequence of: thin non-breaking space, dot, thin non-breaking space, dot, thin non-breaking space, dot, thin space. I.e., thin non breaking space before each dot and the last one followed by a thin space. I'm using a non-breaking thin space at the beginning because the book I'm working on uses ellipses for a pause so I don't want it to be at the beginning of a line.

Hmph. The Kobo doesn't display those thin non-breaking spaces properly, just little rectangles with question marks in them. :smack:

A safe bet is just 3 dots in a row. No space. This still looks better that the single digit ellipse. Of course use 4 dots if the ellipse ends a sentence.

Dale

You need to sideload and use a better font which actually contains those "special" space glyphs. It sounds like the font you're currently using doesn't have them.

See these 2 topics for extremely detailed discussion:

break/no-break and other spaces
[old thread] non breaking spaces (* and *) automatically removed

I also believe I referenced a Jellby post where he discusses all the ins-and-outs of when to attach ellipses before/after with non-breaking spaces (IIRC there were at least 5 different cases you'll run across).

... I stick with individual periods with non-breaking spaces between:

I work on many books with 4+-dot ellipses, and it was the only consistent way to deal with them in ebooks.

It also is the only way that consistently:

• works across devices/readers/programs
• actually prevents line-breaking
• works on all fonts

And like was already mentioned, using rarer spaces is probably going to get you the blank squares or ? to appear everywhere.

A true elipsis is a single character. They do often seem overly narrow to eyes used to seeing the three periods cheat. If you use 3 periods, they should not have spaces between them. Personally, when I use the cheat and it ends a sentence, I prefer to separate then period following the elipsis with a space, thin space when using a decent typographic system and targeting print output.

Look at Post #12 in the topic above where I used some different fonts on MobileRead. You can see the inconsistency in ellipsis spacing in different fonts.

When readers are fully in control of font selection... you can see where issues could arise.

Mostly why many typographers cheat and insert THIN SPACEs between periods.

That hack works in InDesign and other visual-only output, but that's a no-go in ebooks.

If you see one of the Post #48 references I made in the topic, you can see when I tested the linebreaking of the normal THIN SPACE character and its inconsistency across programs.

Sadly, you'll still run into many cases where the previous character could get broken from the attached punctuation.

I still follow the information from this old thread to create "handmade" ellipses.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ghlight=HELLIP

Granted, I am pretty much only working with vintage books, and the modern glyph often just does not look right there. Purely a personal preference.

I also get annoyed that in some fonts, unless you have super-excellent eyesight (which I do not) the ellipsis glyph is so narrow that it is almost indistinguishable from an underscore!

PS --- RbnJrg posted a solution to prevent trailing ellipses and em dashes and other punctuation from breaking off as orphans onto a separate line.
See Post # 17 on this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=NOWRAP&page=2

CSS:
This span is useful for end-of-line for poetry. Also for dialogue, if you have a ton ending with em dash --- it is so annoying to lose the em dash with closing quote mark onto a new line.

But you should not use the span on long words, as it prevents hyphenation, and might cause large gaps along the right-hand margin.

"display: inline-block" used to be outside the ePub 2 specification, and not supported by some readers. I don't know what's the status now, but I wouldn't rely on it.

My preferred (possibly outdated) solutions:

In English: . . . (adding extra   on the side depending on the surrounding punctuation.)

In Spanish: ... (because that's the correct typesetting of an ellipsis in Spanish, got to love its simplicity :D)

I'm a wee bit puzzled here. If it's an ellipsis, well, then use an ellipsis, at least if you're producing epubs for others than yourself or commercially. The reader will probably have his own font-preferences, and some of the solutions here will look somewhat out of proportion in certain fonts, to my eye at least.

Not to mention that screenreaders probably won't recognize dot-space-dot-space-dot or whatever as an ellipsis …

Regards,

Kim

I agree. I listen to books using text-to-speech quite often. Early in my ebook experience I realised that 'dot dot dot' was all too often read aloud as 'dot dot dot'. It sounded like the book was being narrated by a woodpecker! I've been making sure that all my books use proper ellipses ever since.

Of course if you're only producing books for yourself you can do whatever you like.

^^^^ :2thumbsup

That was the thread I was thinking about, thanks! :thumbsup:

Jellby's posts were the ones that initially taught me all the ellipsis edge cases, and I still refer to them so many years later. :)

Older books also used 5+-periods (or asterisks) for showing "larger chunks of text missing". Trying to use the ellipsis character in non-multiples-of-3 looked VERY odd indeed.

There's also the edge cases of ellipses and other punctuation:

,...
...!
...?
?...

In my tests with:

• TTS (Android, Google Text-to-Speech)
• Built-in Windows Speech

it just takes a few pauses as it parses each period.

TTS Speaking:

I just tested the above sentences in Windows, and all sounded identical.

Hmmm, interesting. Which TTS were you using?

In the off case where you are trying to portray missing text, then you can use whatever convention you wish:  . . . . . , [text missing], or whatever.

There is no way in heck you can accommodate for every reader/device/font/user spacing/etc. so don't even try. Use the grammatically correct symbol and IF the user doesn't like the way it looks, they can complain to the reader/device manufacturer. Chances are they won't even notice...heck, they don't even notice - or care - when there is really bad grammar. They are certainly not going to be as picky as you, the epub designer, are about how thin it may appear. ;)