ellipses, with or without spaces?

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Hmmm, interesting. Which TTS were you using?

Well, it was 10 long years ago … but I suspect the UK voices I used at that time were Ivona (and possibly SVox) with Android apps Mantano, Moon+, FBReader, CoolReader. As I recall TTS punctuation sounds (or lack thereof) could also differ in UK-English and US-English books.

Ellipses just seemed the more reliable option at that time so I made the decision to never allow dot dot dot in my books. It's quite possible that things have improved in 10 years but I wouldn't know because all my books have ellipses. I'm not publishing books for others and I suppose I'm not enough of a typography purist to care about the inter-dot-gap of ellipsis aesthetics.

ETA: In the interests of accuracy (or possibly pedantry) I should correct that timeline. I didn't get my first Android phone until 2013 so that's when the Android tests were done.

However, I had already been using TTS on Windows using paid-for "natural voices" from Nuance/RealSpeak, AT&T and Acapela since 2006. So I'm sure anything I decided in 2013 would have been influenced by those much earlier experiences.

[elibrarian]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

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

I stand corrected as to the TTS engines' rendering of dots vs. ellipsis. Just tried your examples, and there seems to have been some evolution (which of course is good … the danish female voice in Windows is actually endurable now, even if she still put some strange accents upon some word combinations )

Otherwise I still think that an ellipsis should be an ellipsis and not anything else.

to Turtle91 for "… use the grammatically correct symbol …"

Regards,

Kim

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

See these 2 topics for extremely detailed discussion:

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

Thanks, will do!

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

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:

.nowrap {
    text-indent: 0;
    display: inline-block;
}

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.

Thanks, that's a keeper!

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by lumpynose

Thanks, will do!

I feel that as this is the Workshop and we're discussing eBooks in general that I should mention that the Kindles can bastardize the manually-created ellipses, using either dot-space-dot-space-dot or the dot-thinspace-dot-thinspace-dot method.

On a Kindle, because they're justified, EITHER of those can be stretched, a la Rivers of White. I've seen it, more than once. We have clients that INSIST that we make their ellipses manually (which is, arguably, typographically correct, mind you) rather than using the ellipsis character, but I always warn them about what happens with justification and rivers. They'll also do it with nbsps used to create custom bullet characters with hanging indents, etc.

It's a real issue for those of us doing this commercially. It's not simply a matter of preference; once you've seen a manually-created dot-space-dot-space-dot stretched out, OR broken across lines, which happens ALL the time, the ellipsis character starts to look pretty good.

(slightly):

(Don't get me started on the people who apparently have zero idea how many periods are used in an ellipsis. I would be rich if I had a buck for every wrong ellipsis we've corrected...)

Hitch

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

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.

That got a smile from me because the wikipedia page on the ellipsis contains this: 'The ellipsis is also called a suspension point, points of ellipsis, periods of ellipsis, or (colloquially) "dot-dot-dot".'

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Hitch

On a Kindle, because they're justified, EITHER of those can be stretched, a la Rivers of White.

That reminds that, as far as I know, there is no standard (or any?) way to control stretching.

In Adobe-powered readers, at least last time I checked,   is not stretched, which causes uneven spacing when used between normal words, but it's probably exactly what you want if used for spacing out the dots in an ellipsis. According to your comment, the Kindles do stretch  , so one can't rely on either behaviour.

If using an embedded font, one could create a custom spaced-out version of …

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Jellby

That reminds that, as far as I know, there is no standard (or any?) way to control stretching.

In Adobe-powered readers, at least last time I checked,   is not stretched, which causes uneven spacing when used between normal words, but it's probably exactly what you want if used for spacing out the dots in an ellipsis. According to your comment, the Kindles do stretch  , so one can't rely on either behaviour.

If using an embedded font, one could create a custom spaced-out version of …

Yuperdoodle, you are 100% right--there's no way to control "stretching" and trust me, it drives me INSANE. Absolutely bone-rattling, head smacking nuts. I cannot TELL you how many times each week I get proof forms from clients telling us to fix this or that, and of course, it's rivers, or stretching, for lack of a better terms. TEETH-grinding time!

They absolutely stretch between dots, between emdashes and words, between all kinds of things. (Inside tables, too, BTW...)

Hitch

[GeoffR]

I would just edit the shape of the ellipse glyph in the font you are using, or use a different font, rather than creating ellipses from dots and spaces in every book.