Monday, 29 August 2011

Ellipsis oops

Here, an ellipsis (colloquially, "dot-dot-dot") is used to indicate the omitted last half of a sentence in a quotation.

Today's word-processing software and web browsers are perfectly capable of generating and displaying a tight, single-unit, unbroken and unbreakable ellipsis.

Since the Star instead used clumsy-looking periods and spaces, it was forced to insert an additional space after the ellipsis and before the sentence-ending period.  But that space should have been a "non-breaking space" to avoid awkward results like this one.

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