I’m putting this up on my blog, as its needed for a piece I’m working on for Ahadada Books called ‘the Kojiki’—as well as a piece at work on patent law. Just a few notes on the ellipsis.
What I’m concerned with today is not so much usage, but typographical considerations. Found this passage on Wikipedia which dealt with the typography of the ellipsis nicely and that I wanted to share with all:
According to Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, the details of typesetting ellipses depend on the character and size of the font being set and the typographer’s preference. Bringhurst writes that a full space between each dot is “another Victorian eccentricity. In most contexts, the Chicago ellipsis is much too wide” — he recommends using flush dots, or thin-spaced dots (up to one-fifth of an em), or the prefabricated ellipsis character (Unicode U+2026, Latin entity …). Bringhurst suggests that normally an ellipsis should be spaced fore-and-aft to separate it from the text, but when it combines with other punctuation, the leading space disappears and the other punctuation follows.
Bringhurst provides the following examples:
- i … j
- k….
- l…, l
- l, … l
- m…?
- n…!
It’s interesting to note that, while up to this point in time the ellipsis has been utilized to note dropped words, phrases or sentences, online it often indicates that more information is on its way (ie ‘Read more…’).
Comments 1
The ellipsis is so overused, especially in online chat and emails. I hate it!
I’ve always treated it as a three-letter word, with three periods and a space on each end — that’s what I was taught to do.
Posted 18 May 2007 at 1:39 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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