in Design
The ellipsis
Three dots look simple. Their spacing, their relationship with other punctuation and their habit of breaking across lines are not.
An ellipsis is a set of three dots. It marks an omission from quoted text, or, in fiction, speech or thought that trails off or hesitates. It is one of the simplest marks to type and one of the more awkward to set well.
One character or three
There are two ways to make an ellipsis in digital text. One is to type three full stops. The other is to use the dedicated ellipsis character, which many fonts include as a single glyph with its own built-in spacing.
The single character has advantages. It cannot be broken across two lines, it is spaced by the type designer to suit the face, and it is easy to search for. Its disadvantage is that in some fonts the dots are set too close together, especially in comparison with the word spaces around them.
Three full stops give the typesetter more control over spacing, but the stops can be separated at a line break unless they are joined with non-breaking spaces or suitable settings. Unspaced full stops also tend to look cramped in book text.
Different publishers and style guides choose differently. Some prefer the ellipsis glyph, some prefer spaced full stops, and some specify thin or non-breaking spaces between the dots. Whatever the choice, it should look the same throughout the book.
Spacing around it
The question of whether to put a space before or after an ellipsis depends on house style. Many British styles set a space on either side of an ellipsis that stands between words; others close it up to the preceding word. American styles vary as well.
The main practical rule is that an ellipsis should never be left at the start of a line when it belongs to the word before it, and never separated from the word it follows at the end of a line. A non-breaking space before the ellipsis prevents this. Where the ellipsis leads into a following word, a normal space after it allows a line break at the natural point.
Ellipses and other punctuation
An ellipsis sometimes meets a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark. Style guides handle this in different ways. Some omit the full stop when an ellipsis ends a sentence, keeping the three dots only. Others, including some American styles, use four dots when the omission follows the end of a complete sentence. Question marks and other punctuation are normally kept and placed next to the ellipsis according to where they fall in the original.
In quoted material, an ellipsis indicates that words have been removed. Some styles place it in square brackets to make clear the omission is editorial rather than part of the original.
In fiction, an ellipsis at the end of speech suggests a voice trailing away, while a dash suggests an interruption. Authors sometimes use the two interchangeably, and it is worth the editor’s attention, because readers do hear the difference.
How often, and how consistently
Ellipses are easy to overuse, particularly in dialogue and in first drafts. A page with many of them starts to look dotted and hesitant, and the device loses its effect. That is an editorial matter rather than a typographic one, but the typesetter is often the first person to see how a page of them looks.
Manuscripts usually mix the forms: glyphs, three stops, two stops, four stops, spaced and unspaced. The best approach is to regularise them all during copy-editing, then search for each variant again after typesetting. It is quick and prevents a surprising number of small inconsistencies.
Three dots should say that something is missing. They should not draw attention to themselves.