[self-correction] At 2026-02-12T15:23:33-0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2026-02-12T21:10:37+0000, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote: > > Seen in contrib/rfc1345.tmac as > > > > .char \[,.] \[u2026]\" HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (Vim 8.0.0062) [...] > > I found neither '\*(El' nor '\*[El' strings in my man[1-8] directories > > from Debian. > > So these are not common there. > > I'm not enthusiastic about this. > > 1. It's not portable. Anyone opting into rfc1345.tmac usage is > necessarily exercising groff extensions.
Sorry, I went too fast and thought you were suggesting: .ds El \[u2026]\" HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (Vim 8.0.0062) ...in clear contradiction to what you actually wrote. My bad. That still leaves point 2. > 2. groff_man_style(7), which I feel applies generally: > > • Why doesn’t the package provide a string to insert an ellipsis? > > Examples of ellipsis usage are shown above, in subsection > “Synopsis macros”. The idiomatic roff ellipsis is three dots > (periods) with thin space escape sequences \| internally > separating them. Since dots both begin control lines and are > candidate end‐of‐sentence characters, however, it is sometimes > necessary to prefix and/or suffix an ellipsis with the dummy > character escape sequence \&. That fact stands even if a string > is defined to contain the sequence; further, if the string ends > with \&, end‐of‐sentence detection is defeated when you use the > string at the end of an actual sentence. (Ending a sentence with > an ellipsis is often poor style, but not always.) A hypothetical > string EL that contained an ellipsis, but not the trailing dummy > character \&, would then need to be suffixed with the latter when > not ending a sentence. > > Instead of... ...do this. > ────────────────────────────────────────────────── > .ds EL \&.\|.\|. Arguments are > Arguments are .IR src‐file\~ .\|.\|.\& > .IR src‐file\~ \*(EL\& .IR dest‐dir . > .IR dest‐dir . > ────────────────────────────────────────────────── > > The first column practices a false economy; the savings in typing > is offset by the cost of obscuring even the suggestion of an > ellipsis to a casual reader of the source document, and reduced > portability to non‐roff man page formatters that cannot handle > string definitions. > > Unicode defines an ellipsis code point, and some fonts have an > ellipsis glyph, which some man pages have accessed non‐portably > with the font‐dependent \N escape sequence. We discourage their > use; on terminals, they may crowd the dots into a half‐width > character cell, and do not render at all if the output device > lacks the glyph. In synopses, missing ellipses can mislead the > reader. Dots and space are universally supported. Regards, Branden
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