Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
Actually, I think in standard book-making, all ellipses are three characters. When a fourth is added, then it is a full stop (period) and not technically part of the ellipsis.
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In modern English typography... perhaps. Different Style Guides may or may not agree.
Also, the typographer of an older book may have had older Style Guides that completely disagreed with the rules now given by the modern versions. You also have to keep in mind that other languages/countries may have their own typography and Style Guides.
I don't have any samples of these older books on hand, although I do remember it in a handful of Archive.org scans I have digitized.
Side Note: This reminds me of this fascinating article, "Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history)". The author goes through even these older Style Guides themselves (like new/older versions of the Chicago Manual of Style) and demolishes this "double-spacing" myth! I assume something similar could be said about ellipses:
http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324
Similarly, asterisks were used along the same lines in the middle of paragraphs:
Quote:
Here is an ending sample sentence. * * * * * Here is some more sentences of text. And continuing.
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If I recall correctly, these were used as:
- Rough way for certain typographers to be able to squeeze/push widows/orphans off of further pages
- Help "square off" the bottom of pages
- Section breaks
- Alternative to show "missing text"
In many cases, it is hard to tell exactly what the typographer was thinking, so it is very hard to "reverse" or "modernize" the decision.
Is this ACTUALLY missing text, or was it a pause, was it a punctuation mark in the original text that is being quoted, was it just a design decision, ...?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
I was assuming that three or even four dots without a space between would be regarded as a single word by most or all e-book platforms. Am I wrong about that?
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According to my testing, three or four periods in a row with NO SPACES between would be ok. Although as Jellby stated, I have seen the "ellipsis + period" or "period + ellipsis" break according to the linebreak algorithms.
If you wanted to stick with the ellipsis character, you would have to insert a non-breaking space to connect the ellipsis to the period before/after in order for them to stick together. So, "ellipsis + nbsp + period" and "period + nbsp + ellipsis" should work... although again having a space there isn't necessarily the proper way according to certain Style Guides.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
The only case I can think of where a four-dot ellipsis would change under my e-book formula is where the omission comes at the beginning of the following sentence. In a printed book, I would go dot/space/dot/space/dot/space/dot/space, but in an e-book I would go dot/space/dot/dot/dot/space.
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And you also have to keep in mind all of the spacing rules for certain punctuation, how do you handle not just periods before/after, but commas, quotation marks, question marks, exclamation points, brackets, parenthesis, etc. etc. The situation gets a lot hairier than you first expect, and many of these are hard, and have to be decided on a case by case basis according to context.
As I said, a huge pain in the butt!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
Probably. I've seen too many linebreaks before/after question/quote marks, with or without a hyphen, to keep any faith I initially had on the linebreaking algorithms of ebook readers.
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Yep, and I believe when I first started, I saw the "ellipsis + period/question mark/exclamation point/quote mark" change into a "period + linebreak + punctuation", which is why is another reason why I abandoned using the ellipsis character.
To fix this, you would have to probably insert something like a zero-width space, although this would create HIDEOUSLY ugly code...... and devices probably do not have very good support for that, so zero-width spaces will show up as "missing character" boxes or quotation marks. Bleh!
Also, I just thought of another thing devices might break on, SEARCH. It is much easier to search for a three or four periods in a row, than it is to search for text with an ellipsis character.