The (Perhaps Obvious) Question of Ellipses

[Prestidigitweeze]

Since I possess the programming skills of a fossilized coelacanth, I'm going to ask two questions that might seem absurdly obvious:

Is there a way to get Calibre to honor the number and spacing of ellipsis points and

Is the issue created by settings within Calibre itself or within those of one of the Kobo plugins?

Ellipses are important to me because the number of points determines whether the writer is denoting the end of a complete sentence or a hesitation or omission within it. When I write a book, I'm careful to ensure that every ellipsis is correct (and that spaces separate all ellipsis points but the first in a four-point ellipsis or the last in a quotation), but once I transfer the book to Calibre, every single instance gets changed to a three-point ellipsis with squeezed spaces (if not the ellipsis character).

What I'd like to know is whether a setting can prevent that from happening and, if so, what that setting is and where to access it.

[BetterRed]

@Prestidigitweeze - I suspect its the Smarten Punctuation feature see calibre tips and tricks: ebook format conversion

When this is selected before the conversion, all plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis are converted to their typographically correct equivalents. For example, plain quotes to curly quotes.

Smarten Punctuation is also a feature of Polish Books, the Modify Plugin and the Book Editor

I don't think you can turn off ellipsis transform without losing the others - ie its all or nothing.

BR

[Prestidigitweeze]

When this is selected before the conversion, all plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis are converted to their typographically correct equivalents. For example, plain quotes to curly quotes.

The problem with that sentence is that it equates the correct smartening of quotes with the incorrect obliteration of function-dependent ellipses. Any professional editor will tell you that replacing a four-point ellipsis at the end of a sentence with three points is absolutely incorrect.

What a terrible decision to have to make: Either to put up with double dashes and straight quotes or to obliterate correct ellipsis points. It's the punctuation equivalent of the judgment of Solomon!

[BetterRed]

@Prestidigitweeze - What do you write with, maybe we can find an easy way for you to type an ellipsis followed by a space or punctuation prior to you putting your work into calibre.

When I'm using word, for an ellipsis I press 'ctrl/alt/.', for an em its 'ctrl/alt/-' and for an en its 'ctrl/-' When I convert a docx containing - ' end…. ' - with smarten punctuation selected it leaves the ellipsis and full stop alone.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

I dont see this behavior. Smarten Punctuation will convert

Some sentence....

into

Some sentence….

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Is the issue created by settings within Calibre itself or within those of one of the Kobo plugins?

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I dont see this behavior. Smarten Punctuation will convert

Some sentence....

into

Some sentence….

Then it must be something with Kobo PI's or device

@Prestidigitweeze - assuming the Kobo is reading an EPUB, open the EPUB in the Calibre editor - select book, press 'T' - and look at the 'code'

Attached is an example, I've highlighted my 4 dot conversions

Added And/or have a look in the Calibre Viewer


BR

[JSWolf]

What you can do after the smarten is to search for all ellipses and a period (there is no such thing as a 4 dot ellipse as it's a 3 dot ellipse and a period) then you can edit them as needed. What's left would be just ellipses without the period and you could search/replace them with what you want them to look like.

[Prestidigitweeze]

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.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

(there is no such thing as a 4 dot ellipse as it's a 3 dot ellipse and a period)

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:

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.

Note that Mignon Fogarty uses even spacing between points and not the ellipsis character in this Grammar Girl entry about ellipses:

Grammar Girl: Ellipses

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

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.

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.