Amount of horizontal space before an ellipsis
A colleague to me has another opinion than me about the amount of horizontal space before an ellipsis.
My opinion:
In my mind, an ellipsis can be used when a word is interrupted (a) - or when a sentence is interrupted (b):
(a) “What the f...”
(b) “Well, I don’t know ...”
I think it is logical to have no space in (a) and a space in (b). The logic being, that the first point of the ellipsis is placed precisely where the first left-out character should have been.
My colleagues opinion:
In example (b) she would reduce the horizontal space before the ellipsis, much as you would e.g. a semi-colon.
Have you ever seen that done? To me, it makes it harder to distinguish between the a- and the b-type.
25.May.2008 5.46am
I’m not sure about Denmark, but in the States & UK, there is no hard and fast rule. People have preferences, and often they are quite sure their preferences are the only correct useage.
With regard to ellipses generally, I know of three distinct styles in the States, AP (Associated Press), MLA (Modern Language Association), and Chicago (Chicago Manual of Style). All are different, and there are probably more.
Remember too that the ellipsis as a character is fairly new, traditionally it is a sequence of periods. Periods always have sidebearings, so that space has to be considered as well. With the inclusion of an ellipsis “character,” I’ve noticed that the sidebearings of that character are frequently different than for the period itself.
A story: We had a new customer — new to us — who tried to tell us how to set ellipses as they preferred (“preferred” wasn’t the term they used, but we’re allowing for individual taste here). Their specification was in terms of a particular typesetting program, which wasn’t one we happened to use. To pin down what they wanted, I made up a period with no sidebearings & wrote a little routine that let us set about 100 of them, with the space between the dots and the space outside the ellipsis varying, with about 10 unit increments (1000 unit em). We sent them a PDF & said “pick one.”
I believe they got the point.
25.May.2008 11.23am
There’s more complexity than you might guess, particularly when you combine the mark with end punctuation. Chicago governs most book publishing, and has consistently asked for equal spaces between all the dots and the characters they sit next to. If you vary much from this most editors will consider it a mistake, and they don’t want to look foolish to their peers.
25.May.2008 11.38am
I’ve never used it with a preceding space, but I’ve also never worked with book editors.
25.May.2008 5.15pm
When a word is cut off I’ve usually seen an em dash used, as in: “Help! He’s got a gu—”. If there’s a trailing-off the ellipses are more appropriate, but that’s much rarer; I’m not sure a space needs to be added before ellipses just so this can be distinguished…
(And how would you punctuate “Hmm…”: with or without the space?)
—Joel
26.May.2008 5.19am
It appears to me that it varies, according the ’nerdness’ of the situation and user.