On Mon, Jun 22, 2009, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
Using .\|.\|. is too "spread out", but the \^ space looks very nice,
and is much simpler.
Note that the effect depends on the font. In particular, in a
fixed-width font (like Courier Roman, \f[CR]), your "..." will
come out with each dot spaced on by the fixed width of a character,
and will look bad. In that case moving the dots closer together,
as in
.char \[el] .\h'-0.25n'.\h'-0.25n'.
would produce a better result.
I beg to differ. There is a general tendency these days to set
the ellipsis way to tight (such as in the predefined "ellipsis"
character in most fonts). Therefore: in a monospaced font such
as Courier, use "..." without negative space. In a proportional
font such as Times, use a full space between dots: ".\~.\~."
(even "\|" is too tight, let alone "\^").
Take a look at some paperback novels from a few years back.
They always use a loosely spaced ellipsis with full spaces.
I'm with Tadziu on this, except that a full word space in a
proportional font is a bit too much--especially if it's stretchable.
Looking back further than just a few years ago, we find that texts
set in metal (hot and cold) tended to use the full word space out of
pure convenience. Individually adjusting the dots in an ellipsis
was simply too much fussy work, rather like hand-morticing letters
in order to kern them, which also wasn't routinely done.
Once phototypesetting became the norm, you see high-quality texts
begin to use the computerized kerning function to bring ellipses a
little closer together, since typographers and designers had never
been happy with the full word space, and doing something about it
was now easy.
How close to set the dots of an ellipsis is a matter of taste AND
of the sense you want them to convey. In texts of a technical
nature, where an ellipsis indicates an established sequence that
continues, (e.g. a, b, c...), the ellipses should, in fact, be
fairly tight. In other texts--say, fiction--where an ellipsis
might indicate a dangling sentence, or be used to join a series of
disconnected thoughts (as in stream-of-consciousness), the ellipses
should definitely be looser.
With the mom macros' \*[FU<n>] string, I find ellipses come out
tastefully spaced with
\*[FU4].\*[FU6].\*[FU6].\*[FU8]
The "U" stands for "kern Unit", which mom establishes at 1/36 of the
current point size (1/36 of an em). The proportional nature of the
kern unit means that if you change point sizes, the "feel" of the
ellipses remains the same.
And since you don't want ellipses joined to a word such that groff
interprets both the word and the ellipsis as a whole word and thus
breaks the line *before* the word (which can lead to gaping holes
in the broken line), a useful string for ellipses should include a
zero-width break point. Thus
.ds ellipsis \:\*[FU4].\*[FU6].\*[FU6].\*[FU8]\"