Re: Ellipsis

From: Elliotte Harold (elharo@metalab.unc.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 20 2006 - 05:59:51 CST

  • Next message: Stephane Bortzmeyer: "Re: Ellipsis"

    Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

    > Thus, far from making the horizontal character unusable, this raises
    > the question whether the four-dots ellipsis should be coded, too.

    I'd argue no. I don't believe there is such a character. The four dot
    ellipsis has always been explained to me as a regular three dot ellipsis
    followed by a period. The rules for its use support that. It only
    appears at the end of a sentence. The ellipsis and the period are two
    separate punctuation marks which occasionally fall next to each other.
    Encoding a four dot ellipsis would be like encoding ?" or !" as a single
    character.

    I also think its important to be able to recognize periods in plain
    text, using four dot ellipses would make that harder.

    The only justification for four dot ellipses is glyph matching, and
    Unicode has never been a glyph encoding standard.

    -- 
    Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
    XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
    http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
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