Monday, March 30, 2015

A perfect ellipsis

Getting the ellipsis right in pixels is a tricky business. Three spaced periods (as The Chicago Manual of Style recommends) look . . . ungainly. Four spaced periods (an ellipsis plus a period) can look ridiculous . . . .

The horizontal ellipsis character (made by typing …) looks … better. But when that a period follows that character, things look a bit off …. See how much larger the final period looks?

Last night, when I was typing a short post, I realized that I could make an ellipsis and period by using the hair space ( ). Periods and hair spaces make a perfect ellipsis-plus:  . . . . Or in plain English: . . . .

comments: 4

Slywy said...

I don't like the … ellipsis — too crammed and Microsofty.

Michael Leddy said...

I prefer . . . in print.

Slywy said...

Ha, Blogger changed the code I put in to HTML. For some reason, I think more basic HTML.

Michael Leddy said...

You need the code tags: < code > and < /code >, minus the spaces.