Ellipsis style?

[James Arboghast]

Patty: Well James thanks for YOUR take on things but I work in book publishing where editors don’t take too kindly to “my way or the highway”. Chicago and Bringhurst are designed to set up common styles and conventions in typesetting that make it clear TO THE READER what is going on. If you want to reinvent punctuation, be my guest, but don’t expect your readers to thank you.

I have never sought to reinvent punctuation, only to keep it simple. Why do you assume bad faith regarding my methods (why else would you type in capitals)? The way I handle ellipsis is aimed at making it clear to the reader what is going on in a text.

...if you’re typesetting a novel for folks to read, creating your own punctuation styles will only confuse, distract, and annoy your readers.

I've not done novels or story anthologies, but for jobs where I've set prose fiction including dialog with ellipses and emdashes I quizz readers about the clarity of the typesetting. It turns out very few readers are even aware of any difference between ellipsis and emdash. For dialog the two marks have much the same effect and meaning as far as readers can tell.

An ellipsis has a VERY different function editorially than an em-dash. The function of an ellipsis is to indicate omission in cited text. Yes, it is used as well to indicate a pause or hesitation in thought or trailing off, but those are not its primary function. In those latter cases it could perhaps be replaced with another character. But in its primary function it must be used as is.

Why is ellipsis only supposed to be used to indicate omission in cited text? What about omission in other kinds of text? And if that's the editorial function of an ellipse, please define the editorial function of an emdash.

charles_e: I’m sure many of you don’t like all the characters in the Latin alphabet. They make kerning hard, and some of them are downright ugly. Plus, the Latin alphabet is archaic. Why don’t we just make a new one, with characters better suited to our tastes?

I love all of the characters in the Latin alphabet. It could be improved a great deal however, if only the world would allow type designers to do so.

j a m e s

[dezcom]

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[nina]

I hope you guys don't mind me reviving this interesting oldie, but I have to add that it seems quite US-centric. To add an international perspective: Putting spaces of any kind into the 3 dot sequence is not commonly done over here – I would say not in continental Europe, but at least not in Switzerland. Perhaps as a consequence, the unspaced "..." sequence does not usually seem too tight to me.
So there is a cultural aspect to this, and one interesting thing that follows is that ellipses in American-designed fonts often seem looser to me than the ones in European fonts, and sometimes distractingly loose. When designing for an international market these regional differences might be interesting to consider.

[Stephan Kurz]

Can anyone confirm that there was no “ellipsis character” before the advent of DTP as mentioned in one of the posts above? I saw what appears to be three dots on one key at a linotype keyboard (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach/5944029870/, bottom right) -- but cannot say if that key is really for typing an ellipsis character (it has a different shape than the other keys).

[kentlew]

First of all, I don’t think that’s a Linotype keyboard. Looks more like Monotype, and (as someone already pointed out there) it has a Monotype label.

Secondly, I believe that key is for a three-dot leader. If you look at the same position in the left hand compartment, below the period, you’ll also see a two-dot leader.

I suppose a three-dot leader (presumably three-to-em) could have been used in place of an ellipsis — I don’t know if that was common practice in Monotype composition or not. If so, then I suppose I’ll have to stand corrected.

[Stephan Kurz]

Kent, thanks for the idea with the dot leader (and for being with me helping revive “this interesting oldie”, as Nina put it above [back in 2010!]). Somewhere I came across this already, but I did not see its significance then. Maybe part of the aversion against using the ellipsis character is connected with the wideness of an em-wide dot leader that had been used on Monotype machines to avoid manual spacing (and several keystrokes). This makes sense, also when comparing different printed matter from the late 19th and early 20th century, where books with Monotype mentioned in the imprint do feature exceptionally wide ellipsis marks. I have yet to check that again, but wanted to share that possible connection between dot leaders and ellipses – or, rather, this confusion in the representation of two different functions.

[dtw]

Has anyone thought of using the text from spam forum posts as a source of lorem ipsum?

[nina]

Cool idea for a typeface specimen actually. :)