My opinoon anyway is that the single character ellipsis only exists in the UCS for backward compatibility with legacy encodings, that were initially designed at time where they were used on terminals with limited graphic capabilities and using only monoospaced fonts (including for tetext, broadcasted and display on old low resolution analog TV, displaying only 24/25 rows with about 40 character cells), or old computer monitors displaying only monochromatic text in standard 25x80 cell grids, or old printers producing voluminous listings for mainframes, or data input and storage on disks or bands with limited capacity or bandwidth.
Only to save a couple of cells three dots in the same cell allowed capacting text. It just remained readable, but not typographically good. But you make a point with East-Asian (CJK) scripts rendered in monospaced grids: using a full cell only to display a single dot is a waste of space (cells are larger for these scripts with their many strokes) and changes dramatically the speed of reading for runs. But then the existing ellipsis is not a good candidate because it has the incorrect metrics where it should use the sinographic metrics. And that's why we have monospaced fullwidth or half-width variants encoded for common Latin, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, and some precomposed Latin-based symbols like measurement units, or common abbreviations based on Japanese Kanas. Hangul is different because its composition square already allows composing some squares with base Jamo letters, but it will also use some common Latin-based abbreviations or symbols. They also have different versions for punctuation signs, that better fit the East-Asian composition square. But the encoded ELLIPSIS does not fit correctly there. These scripts are also not concerned the same way by features like justification, "tracking" or by glyph scaling modifying the aspect ratio. These scripts also are much more tolerant to line breaks, and don't need complex hyphenation rules as you can break them after almost all squares (most of these squares encoding a full syllable, and many words being monosyllabic). The rare punctuation signs are rarely needed in sequences so they could make an exception for the ellipsis compacted in the same composiition square. Minor problems may only occur with long numbers written with positional digits, or with text mixes that are alternating runs of half-width characters with runs written in full-width squares, or with paragraph-ending punctuations that would be orphaned after a line break (but I don't think they will alter the vertical alignment of squares (for horizontal lines). But traditional vertical rendering or artistic painted calligraphy would not care about these alignment constraints across successive rows and aligment of final cells on the right or bottom margin. 2013/9/13 Stephan Stiller <[email protected]> > Once you've increased the width of these interword spaces to their >>> maximum, all the characters (and these increased spaces) should be >>> justified using interletter spacing, and this extra interletter spacing >>> should be applied as well between the dots of the ellipsis (showing that >>> they are effectively 3 separate characters and not just one with a fixed >>> distance between dots). >>> >> You are right that tracking and glyph scaling exist, > > This is not glyph scaling > > Because it's called tracking. > > > if the dots are circular, they remain circular. > > When *glyph scaling* is performed, it's by up to 2% (recommends > Bringhurst). That'll make circles ovals (different meaning of "ellipsis"). > And noone's gonna notice. > > > you may argue that the problem is similiar with the dots or diaresis or > Hebrew and arabic points, but these dots are less essential for correct > understanding of text on low resolution medias, or prints on basic paper > quality and with low cost inks. > > Well, I'm not sure about Arabic i‘jām not being so important for visual > letter discrimination :-) > > Btw, different aspect of the topic: math and Chinese are different; for > those separate ellipsis glyphs make sense. > > Stephan > >
