Re: Empty set

Hi Philippe,

>> i.e. "(...)." at end of a truncated sentence or ". (...)" at
>> start of the next truncated sentence
> Well, for citations in German I've generally seen "[...]", and for
> English I've seen both "[...]" and "...", but not "(...)".
>
> I included it them in my sentence ("parentheses or braces") even if I
> simplified the list of examples (it was intended that you could
> substitute them). Ideally yes square braces are better, except if
> there are other punctuation braces in which the citation is enclosed.
> In some rare cases rounded braces may be seen as well i.e. "{...}".
"braces" in English means just { }. Aside from the context of
programming languages, braces are _rare_ in English and German outside
of math, to the point they'll look esoteric; in ordinary math you see
them only for sets. Anecdotally people in Germany always tell me of a
mythical parenthesis-bracket-brace hierarchy { [ ( ) ] }, which I've
never actually encountered, and btw even the hierarchy [ ( ) ] isn't
used by everyone. And before you get back to me: I don't consider
Poisson brackets (mentioned by Ilya) to be ordinary math.

>> [...] EXCEPT if theses dots are separated by extra spaces (larger
>> than the extra inter-letter spacing on the same line, in case of
>> justification in a column of text between fixed left and right
>> margins)
> Now /that/ is a /good/ argument for providing a separate ellipsis
> glyph.
>
> I don't think so : the ellipsis shoud still use the **same** extra
> inter letter spacing in justified lines as between letters within
> words to make the texxt more visually balanced.
That providing a special font-dependent ellipsis glyph can/will prevent
the ellipsis dots from being affected by typographic tracking was my
point, right? :-) And the exact spacing of the ellipsis dots in relation
to ordinary inter-word spacing and in relation to closed-up dots varies
(and note that most ellipsis glyphs look more like "..." than ". . .",
so this interestingly makes a stylistic choice for you already); as far
as what you wrote is a prescription, it's not crazy, but I don't see why
it should be absolute or which authority or principles it'd be coming from.

> dots in rulers
But I wasn't talking about dotted rules or <hr>-like text elements at all.

Stephan
Received on Fri Sep 13 2013 - 03:34:37 CDT