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Re: 3 dots vanish at end of filled line


From: Karl Berry
Subject: Re: 3 dots vanish at end of filled line
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 19:14:19 -0500

    There should not be
    whitespace before an ellipsis in English text.

I must beg to differ.  Virtually every book I've seen has space before
(most) ellipses.

Aside from typographical matters, ellipses seem to most often be used to
stand for a word rather than as "trailing" punctuation.  Here are a few
random samples from the Texinfo manual:

    Permission is granted to @dots{}
    ...
    one (not Info, not @TeX{}, @dots{}).
    ...
    @item @@iftex @dots{} @@end iftex
    ...
    than `It is recommended that @dots{}''.

It seems wrong to me to omit such spaces.

There are over 130 occurrences of spaces before @dots in the Texinfo
manuals (I didn't search others).  At a glance, the spaces seem
desirable and even necessary to me.  I think a blanket warning would be
a bad mistake, and I don't see any way to distinguish the problematic
cases.

Certainly there are times when no space should be there; so then the
author should leave out the space in the input.  Or no line break; then
the author should use a tie.

karl




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