Re: Origin of Ellipsis (was: RE: Empty set)

Do you mean saving two characters for posting to Tweeter ? Well may be, but
Tweeter clearly does not promote correct typography and not even correct
orthography. It is clearly not a good model for publishing.

But given the history of this character, I just wonder why it was not
mapped along with East-Asian compatibility punctuations where it should
have always been. And many fonts have ignored this history and the intent
for compatibility with legacy CJK codepages. So not only they used
incorrect metrics for use with other scripts, but they also did not honor
the metrics of these CJK scripts. This is now a character which we should
not use at all as it does not even work as intended in any context (except
for those similar to tweets).

If there's something to do now (given it is no longer used in CJK
contexts), it's to strongly recommand that fonts map them to exactly the
same glyph as the one obtained by aligning three periods in a raw without
any additional space or kerning. And may be demand that renderers ignore
these font mappings and systematically replace it with three separate
periods so that they can properly apply correct justifications and glyph
metrics, with at least two branches depending on the previous glyph (CJK or
not, and possibly: if CJK, half-width or fullwidth, otherwise look at font
metrics of the previous glyph to see if it's monospaced or not and if not,
replacing by using 3 standard periods).

Those users that will want more spacing between dots of an ellipsis should
have to use explicit spacing in their encoded texts. And those that want
less spacing should use ligature control such as ZWJ between standard
periods as well Clearly this character must be clearly deprecated for all
uses except CK contexts, and should probably be even dropped from mappings
in most fonts (except CJK or monospaced fonts).

2013/9/15 Andre Schappo <A.Schappo_at_lboro.ac.uk>

>
> On 13 Sep 2013, at 20:02, 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...
>
> --Ken
>
>
> U+2026 is useful for microblogs when one is looking to save characters
>
> André
>
>
>
Received on Sun Sep 15 2013 - 14:25:16 CDT