I want to thank everyone for their helpful comments, which I'll review (and perhaps respond to) over the weekend, when I'll be using my own laptop and can attempt to trace the source of the problem.
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Originally Posted by JSWolf
(there is no such thing as a 4 dot ellipse as it's a 3 dot ellipse and a period)
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Editors have discussed this since time imp-memorial [insert imp].
We can discuss the function of that first ellipsis point -- cf. whether it marks the end of a sentence in the original text or a point following an independent clause that functions as a complete sentence but wasn't one in the source text -- and variants of ellipses that involve other kinds of punctuation (ever notice that commas and semicolons sometimes follow rather than precede three ellipsis points? Often, that distinction is intended to show the exact syntactical locus and function of omitted text in scholarly and legal writing), but the fact remains that many editors
do refer to four-point ellipses because professional layouts often use absolute spacing between all four points, which the three-point ellipsis character doesn't allow.
Nearly all of the books I've edited professionally -- whether in Word, InDesign or, much earlier, in Pagemaker and Quark -- used even spacing between ellipsis points and avoided the three-point ellipsis character. Now that fluid electronic formats have come to dominate text formatting, we see that spacing convention followed less and less, but my decades in publishing make it very difficult to give up even spacing. The ellipsis character simply looks like lazy typesetting to me.
To quote two examples out of many, here's what the
Chicago Style Manual Online says about ellipsis spacing:
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For manuscripts, inserting an ellipsis character is a workable method, but it is not our preferred method. It is easy enough for a publisher to search for this unique character and replace it with the recommended three periods plus two nonbreaking spaces (. . .). But in addition to this extra step, there is also the potential for character-mapping problems (the ellipsis could appear as some other character) across software platforms—an added inconvenience. So type three spaced dots, like this . . . or, at the end of a grammatical sentence, like this. . . . If you know how, use two nonbreaking spaces to keep the three dots—or the last three of four—from breaking across a line.
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Note that Mignon Fogarty uses even spacing between points and not the ellipsis character in this Grammar Girl entry about ellipses:
Grammar Girl: Ellipses
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Most style guides call for a space between the dots. Typesetters and page designers use something called a thin space or a non-breaking space that prevents the ellipsis points from getting spread over two lines in a document - See more at: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/edu....OEyP43B4.dpuf
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Jon -- In the interests of fairness, I feel I should point this out: Fogarty agrees with you even though I work with editors who wouldn't.
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Now that you know how to use ellipses, you need to know how to make them. An ellipsis consists of exactly three dots called ellipsis points—never two dots, never four dots—just three dots.
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