> Looking back further than just a few years ago, we find that > texts set in metal (hot and cold) tended to use the full word > space out of pure convenience. Individually adjusting the > dots in an ellipsis was simply too much fussy work...
Hmmm. I have no experience with metal type, but I thought that's what they had clichés for (if they needed them). > [...] since typographers and designers had never been happy > with the full word space [...] Any citations on this? The typophile forum seems divided on the issue. Chicago apparently specifies a 1/3 em space between dots. I prefer a normal word space (with an equal space to any attached words for consistency) because this preserves the rhythm of the line. > In texts of a technical nature, where an ellipsis indicates > an established sequence that continues, (e.g. a, b, c...), > the ellipses should, in fact, be fairly tight. Well, in math they're usually not very tight. TeX by default appears to use something like 3/18 em between dots (which corresponds to troff's "\|"), and as far as I've understood, this is not based on convenience but rather on a long history of math typesetting. > And since you don't want ellipses joined to a word such that > groff interprets both the word and the ellipsis as a whole > word and thus breaks the line *before* the word (which can > lead to gaping holes in the broken line), a useful string > for ellipses should include a zero-width break point. Thus > > .ds ellipsis \:\*[FU4].\*[FU6].\*[FU6].\*[FU8]\" Wouldn't that leave an unwanted space at the beginning of the next line?
