[texhax] \ldots v. \cdots

[Pierre MacKay]

>Indeed, I think this depends on which side of the pond you happen to be
>writing: all American sources appear to suggest a four-dot version.
>However, at schoold in England I was taught never to use four dots; this
>page
>http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-4100100en.htm
>and, I believe, the Oxford Guide to Style suggest the same.
>
>Cheers,  Phil
>
>  
>
So that explains it.  This is one instance where Unicode fonts do not 
usually help much, because
the normal ellipsis character in the General Punctuation page looks very 
bad with regular type.  It is much too tight.
It looks even worse, of course when a three-dot ellipsis is either 
preceded or followed by a full stop. 
The house style I set for is fairly firm about the four-dot ellipsis for 
sentence end, and the ellipsis
abuts the text immediately, with no interword space.

I set a four-language journal (potentially five, since Latin is 
recognized, although never used) and these national
considerations can be quite fascinating.  Em-dash with or without 
interword spaces, for instance and, even
more odd to a north American eye,  em-dash followed by interword space 
and punctuation. 

Pierre MacKay