Chicago/MLA ellipsis versus the Unicode defined AP ellipsis

[Ken Whistler]

Asmus,

I'm gonna disagree. Adding a variation sequence would just confuse 
existing practice, and wouldn't deal with the edge cases where the 
spaced-out ellipses bump into other punctuation. See a more nuanced 
discussion of the issue at:

https://cmosshoptalk.com/2019/07/30/dot-dot-dot-a-closer-look-at-the-ellipsis/

Basically, an ellipsis is an ellipsis is an ellipsis, sure, but when one 
gets to concerns about exact appearance in a publication, that becomes a 
copyedit issue, and standard practice is simply to insert the NBSP (or 
NNBSP, depending on preference) to space dots out to match the spec and 
prevent unwanted line breaks. It may be a bit of a PITA for somebody who 
uses ellipses in text to have to insert NBSP in some instances to follow 
the style guide, but as a copyedit issue, that basically falls into the 
same category, in my reckoning, as worrying about whether the periods 
are inside or outside of the quotation marks, for example.

One should not assume that plain text poured into a text renderer is 
automatically going to follow every last detail of a style guide such as 
CMOS. Preparation for publication assumes markup for styling, of course, 
but may also require specialized handling for hyphenation (or prevention 
thereof) *and* attention to detail of spacing that might not be entirely 
handled automatically by a generic renderer.

So I'm not in favor of getting variation selectors involved here as 
well, which would likely just introduce more distinctions that wouldn't 
always work as expected but would likely require more hacky overrides in 
edge cases if used.

--Ken

On 4/17/2023 1:56 PM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
> Given the facts as stated, the conclusion would be that this should be 
> proposed for a variation sequence.
>