Hopefully the last time about the dots

    Today, the Designer of All Russia made a typographical sketch on a fan in his personal blog in Livejournal.
    So guys. The ellipsis consists of three dots. “Knock, knock, knock” - these are exactly the sounds your keyboard should make. In no case should you use a symbol called an ellipsis (...). This symbol one contains all three points in itself. It was invented for monospace typing and saving bytes, but it is impossible to use it for typesetting books, as well as newspapers and magazines.
    Actually, half of the lemmings began to joyfully accept the order of the Designer of All Russia.
    Robert Bringhurst, “The Basics of Typography Style,”

    Most currently finished fonts include, among other characters, a ready-made ellipsis (a sequence of three points on the font line). However, many printers prefer to make ellipses themselves. Some gain three points without beats ... with a normal interword space before and after the ellipsis [the norm of English typography - approx. Heath]. Others beat the dots. . . thin spations. Third espions (one-third of the size) are prescribed by The Chicago Manual of Style, but this is yet another manifestation of Victorian eccentricity. In most cases, the Chicago ellipsis is too wide.

    The ellipsis typed without beats does not look good in all fonts and styles. In small text pins - for example, in 8-point footnotes - as a rule, it is better to add a space (up to one fifth of the pins) between the points. An extra space may also be needed among light, open fonts, such as Baskerville, and a smaller one, in combination with rich fonts, such as Trajanus, or when typing in bold.
    So is Artemy Lebedev right or wrong?

    Actually, as we see, it all depends on the font, and three points without manual kerning can look much more wretched (for example, sparse) than the ellipsis developed by the font author. Therefore, if you do "knock-knock-knock", then  manual kerning is almost always necessary. I'd love to believe in typesetters of newspapers and magazines. :) In my opinion, it is better for employees of not very high qualifications (which are the majority in the profession) to always use ready-made ellipses.

    In principle, if font designers always correctly prescribed kerning pairs for a sequence of points, then the ellipsis symbol could have not been used, always typing three points.

    As for the kit for the web, Artemy kept silent about it in the context of ellipsis. Apparently, implying that he does not provide such a specific recommendation for the web. Given all of the above, such a recommendation would have nowhere to come from: with a low resolution of screen typography and with a scarcity of a set of standard fonts, it is not known which is better - a relatively narrow finished ellipsis, or wide because of dots.

    As for the history of the mark, the U + 2026 character originally appeared in Unicode to ensure backward compatibility with the Xerox Character Code Standard encoding, and it encoded three outflow points (a sequence of points connecting the book's table of contents element with the number of the corresponding page). However, quite quickly it was associated with dots of other obsolete encodings, including the Macintosh Character Set. Ellipsis is present in some obsolete encodings and absent in others, so the assertion that the ellipsis character was used to save bytes is, at least, unfounded.

    Well, the last is semantics. Still, the ellipsis is a separate punctuation mark with a separate function, so personally, I prefer to use it in electronic document management. Naturally, this issue does not play a role in printed matter.

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