2013-09-13 22:02, Whistler, Ken wrote:
The *interesting* question, in my opinion, is why folks feel impelled to use U+2026 to render a baseline ellipsis in Latin typography at all, rather than just using U+002E ad libitum...
In traditional typography, an ellipsis usually has dots set apart much more than what you get when you simply have FULL STOP characters in succession. The HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS character is supposed to have more spacing. There are different conventions and practices for different languages and by different typographers, but generally, three FULL STOP characters are too close to each other.
Handling such things at the level of styling or formatting commands tends to be somewhat awkward, so HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS is a simple solution – and really the only solution in plain text. For example, in web publishing, if you use FULL STOP to construct an ellipsis, you would need something like <span class=ellipsis>...</span> and then would need to carefully design a style sheet rule for .ellipsis, trying to find a suitable value for letter-spacing. In effect, you would be doing a typographer’s work, with inferior tools. Compare this with the ease of using … or the “…” character directly.
Such thinking is, however, somewhat impractical. In fonts commonly used for word processing and desktop publishing, HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS is usually not that well designed. Sometimes (e.g., in the Verdana font)it even has the dots closer to each other than in a sequence of three FULL STOP characters!
But I think that the most common cause of the appearance of HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS is that Microsoft Office Word automatically changes a sequence of three FULL STOP characters to HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS. Most users probably don’t even notice this, or know how to disable it.
Yucca
