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Comment by notpushkin

5 months ago

Please don’t... Adding ellipsis as a separate character was a huge mistake, because it doesn’t work well:

- you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it

- the spacing between the dots is awful in a lot of fonts

- it is hideous in monospace

- typing ellipsis properly is a very easy gesture (triple-tap the dot key), arguably easier than Alt Gr + . (depending on the keyboard)

11 comments

notpushkin

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dragonwriter  5 months ago

> you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it

But an ellipsis is separate from and doesn't mmerge with sentence-terminal punctuation, whether its a period or somethig else (when it replaces words at the end of a sentence, the terminal punctuation follows the ellipsis, when at the beginning of a sentence that follows another, the ellipsis follows the punctuation.) The constructs you say can't be formed with it aren't needed.

  • notpushkin  5 months ago

    Hmm, yeah, you’re right – in English this isn’t really used. However it’s a widely used punctuation in Russian (and many ex-USSR languages, too), so... no, they are needed in some cases.

  • Moru  5 months ago

    This is why we only had ascii in the start. You don't need those other characters anyway. (For english...)

    Meanwhile there are a lot of languages and cultures. Somewhere all those characters were useful for something. My Atari had a very fun utility that gave you a compose-key that could combine just about everything on the keyboard to access all those weird characters of the extended ascii table. <compose>+ao would give you "a" with a ring on top (å), <compose>+ae gave the danish welded together character that I can't even type any more on windows.

    The idea came from some unix thing I believe.

pxc  5 months ago

I've only ever typed that character using a compose key: caps and then the same three periods.