As a punctuation fetishist I just had to dash off and check ...
The most common form of an ellipsis is a row of three periods or full stops (. . .) or a pre-composed triple-dot glyph (…). Although an ellipsis is technically complete with three periods its rise in popularity as a "trailing-off" or "silence" indicator, particularly in mid-20th century comic strip and comic book prose writing, has led to expanded uses online. Today, extended ellipsis anywhere from two to dozens of periods have become common constructions in Internet chat rooms and text messages
Different ‘expert’ sources give different points of view:
Bringhurst’s ‘Essentials of Typographic Style’ holds that the details of typesetting ellipsis depend on the character and size of the font being set and the typographer's preference.
The Chicago Manual of Style recommends that an ellipsis be formed by typing three periods.
The Modern Language Association, however, says that an ellipsis must include spaces before and after each dot in all uses.
The Associated Press Manual holds that when the omitted text contains a period, a four-dot, spaced (except for before the first dot) ellipsis (. . . . ) should be used.
In computing several ellipsis characters have been codified, depending on the system used. There are 8 in Unicode, 5 in TEX, 3 in HTML, 3 in Windows, 2 in MS-Dos and 1 in OSX, all of them slightly different.
Excuse me while I now go off to measure my ellipsis with a micrometer ...........
The rest is silence ...Statistics: Posted by rathbone — 29 Aug 2012, 17:47
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