I’ve been curious for some time whether an ellipsis should be followed by a space before the next character… should it?

The mark on your keyboard next to the colon and semi colon is not a quotation mark, it is a prime and double-prime.

I’m no typographer but, according to Unicode, the prime and double-prime characters are represented by the code points U+2032 and U+2033 respectively; the key just to the right of the semicolon (U+0027) is apparently an apostrophe; the shift-variant of this (U+0022) is officially called ?QUOTATION MARK? but would appear to be a mere remnant with no place in computer typography, obsoleted by the much more sensible curly versions.

Ligatures are great for typeset text in print or typeset text rendered in images, but are they so good for text copy on the web? Are search engines and site-search scripts savvy enough to be able know that a fi-lig means fi, or does this mean that google and site searches will not find words with fi-ligs? (I know Acrobat can do this, but search engines?)

If not, it would still be good practise for rendered image headers as long as the heading tag or alt-text does not use the lig.

Ian: different people have different rules. Where the ellipsis is used to leave out a section of text in the middle of a sentence, then a space is generally left before and after the ellipsis. If the ellipsis is used to designate “and so on” at the end of a sentence, it is usually placed directly after the last letter without a space.

case in point: the live-preview shows the ligs fine but in the posted comment above the & is parsed as &-amp; and they show up incorrectly.

Like with hyphenation and justification, maybe browser and web-technology is not yet sophisticated enough to deal with ligs? Please, prove me wrong!

Although it’s a bit off the specific topic of your post, maybe it would be worth mentioning another common quotation mark practice: « («) and » (») normally, ‹ (‹) and › (›) for quotations inside quotations. French, Greek, Italian and Norwegian are some of the languages where this quotation method is used.

“A total grasp of punctuation, grammer(sic) and structure”

Not spelling then?

Ian Corey In Germany it is common practice that an ellipsis representing words or parts of a sentence is followed by a small space, e.g.:
<q>I don’t know …</q>
If an ellipsis represents only letters, it is not followed by a space:
<q>That is bull…</q>
I’m not sure whether you can adopt this to English, but to me this makes sense and looks the best. Give it a try.

As Jakob points out, in some languages, the ellipsis is often used in the same way as etc. “1, 2, 3...”
In such case you would leave a space before continuing with the next word. 

I was actually quite surprised when I first realised it’s not that common around the world. There were a lot of weird responses before I figured out what was going on. ;)

ellipses took thin spaces back in the typeset days. i give them a space.

A few corrections, the character reference(s) you mention for quotation marks are slightly wrong. 0145 and 0146, etc point to control characters, they are only valid as windows-1252 encoding, and won’t display correctly in any browser worth its name. The unicode ref you mention for those is the actual character ref., #8216 is U + 2018, #8217 is U + 2019 (spaces added).
Also, the key combinations depend on the keyboard layout. Typing Option+] on my Mac gives this: ? (French guillemet, I hope it comes through).

Maybe it’s just me not knowing the Œ but in danish it’s Ø (&-Oslash;) being the o and e combined.

well done mr boulton, perhaps you’ll include a handy Welsh carets, circumflexes, or to bach’s in your next issue?

This is kind of useful as a start:
http://www.200words-a-day.com/typing-welsh-characters.html

When using these glyphs, what method of reference should we use: the XHTML entity; the Character reference; or the Unicode reference.

NOTE: In the examples above the unicode reference appears as uBLAH and sometimes &#B;LAH.  Which is correct?  Which do you use etc.

Cheers,
Ryan

Also,

When should the AE, ae, OE, oe etc ligatures be used?  Is there a danager that any automatic system of inserting them will cause problems?  ie, do only some fonts support them etc?

Cheers,
Ryan

ryan, I would not use AE etc. - in french, for example, it’s wrong to use them outside of words like “sœur” (sister). And: Google also finds “soeur” for s&#xC5;&#x93;ur so I’d bet it will work the other way, too.
(marc: my browser gets really slow when typing the eMail-Address - your scriptseems to create the hash for every character I’m typing - maybe you could change this behaviour to only computing it when the user leaves the field?)

You mentioned ? and explained it as ?german double-s? - that?s partly right as we use ? and ss for different usage.

In Norway we use ? or ? as a ligature for OE, and in Sweden they use ? and ?.
I have never seen ? and ? used before though.. Where do they use that?

? is used in French

Since it’s quite ineffective having to press five keys each time you need to insert a special character that isn’t on your keyboard ? and since it can be hard to remember the numeric codes ? I highly recommend using a small hotkey/macro program like Autohotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com/). This one’s free and open source.

In addition to assigning hotkeys for those special characters it can also replace text on the go. For example whenever I type three periods in a row they are automatically replaced by an ellipsis. It’s so nice. :-)

I appreciated your qualification about the quotation marks that practice differs between the UK and the US. Your description of the ellipsis and other punctuation isn’t correct for American editing.

Over here, in most cases, ending punctuation goes inside the closing quotation mark. There are also two major schools of thought as to when (or if) to use four points or three. Many publishers use The Chicago Manual of Style, which prefers to include final punctuation, thus creating ellipses marked by four points on a regular basis. When four points are used in this way, the prefabricated ellipsis glyph is rarely spaced correctly with the other punctuation. The magazines for which I work use spaced points rather than the glyph.

I was always taught that punctuation inside/outside the quotation marks depends entirely on whether it’s part of the quote or not.

If the quote doesn’t contain the punctuation then it belongs outside the quotation marks, if the quote does contain the punctation it belongs inside.  If it’s inside you don’t double up by putting an extra stop etc after the quotation marks.

Ryan--your note about punctuation in/outside of quotation marks is partially true.  The question mark and exclamation point are the most easily recognizable examples, i.e., if the quote itself is a question or exclamation, the mark goes inside quotes, otherwise it remains outside.

E.g.
Have you seen “La Dolce Vita”?
I wonder what he meant, when he asked “Is this it?”

(Though honestly the second example might be somewhat ambiguous, but I meant “wonder” in the declarative.)

The semicolon remains outside quotation marks for American English, while the period is always found inside those quotation marks (also for American English).  The full-stop hovering outside quotation marks is probably the single largest grammatical error one finds when browsing web pages today.

You’re right about not doubling up on full-stops.

Your advice about ellipses and full stops is actually quite wrong (the converse of what is actually correct). There is very little cause to use the ellipsis character on the Web, given that, in all contexts, spacing between dots is an issue.

fi/fl etc. are ligatures; ? ? etc. are digraphs. Eth, thorn, and estset are not digraphs or ligatures.

Neutral quotation mark and apostrophe are thus and are not prime marks at all.

Maybe I should have clarified that this article was discussing the English language - not French, Danish, Spanish or Welsh.

You should have, indeed. One’s inclined to think that the article was discussing typesetting on the web --- and, though, in fact, it would be definitely too much listing all the possible combinations and which is used in each language/culture, I think it would be greatly useful to make emphasis on the fact that there are alternate quoting mark policies, like the angled quotes, that are used in some of the most spoken languages, giving the (more or less) unaware reader the explicit mention that further reading is advised when it comes to a langauge other than English (when you say, “Typesetting on the web”, you mean “web” as in ”World Wide Web”, right? ;) ).

Just my 2?…

Regular spacing within ellipses and alongside a period is a known issue in all fonts under some circumstances and certainly in monospaced fonts? that’s why a lot of people discourage their use? preferring well-spaced periods in threes or fours?.

Sentences that end in ellipses also end in periods, Mark?.

I was under the impression correcting someone didn’t require being a twat.  It seems I was actually quite wrong (the converse of what is actually correct).

Aden,

So even if the period is not actually part of the quote, perhaps it’s the middle of a passage that conveniently serves as a conclusion to your sentence, the period goes inside?  Why is this applied differently to ! and ?.

Is this just a US English rule?

Er, Ryan, hopefully I’m not the “twat” you’re referencing, because I wasn’t trying to be an ass about it, and unfortunately there’s no “edit” button here.  It seems once again punctuation has been stymied by international differences.

Living in America, I was taught from the ground up that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks regardless of its placement in the original quotation (if you’re citing someone), though as for the reasoning involved I have no clue where it started.  One wild guess is that it’s a matter of clarity when typeset, i.e., the commas and periods are small pieces of punctuation, but when placed inside the quotes, there is an easy line for the eye to follow toward the ascending capital letter of the next sentence.

If that sounds like a complete load then it probably is, I can’t find anything that suggests why this is the system Americans use.  But I did find that British typography places punctuation outside the quotation marks.

Of course I probably should have looked it up to check to see if there were international differences before running my mouth off, seeing as it would have cleared up my accidental cultural imperialism.

*sigh*

I did Google for this exact problem, and at this page (http://www.fontsite.com/Pages/RulesOfType/ROT1097.html) I found an extraordinarily brief note about the differences between American and British standards.

That page itself is excerpted from somewhere else, the “Digital Type Design Guide.” If this applies to conventional typesetting, I’m not sure, I just wanted to give you the site where I found the regional differences.

Again--I’m sorry if I was an ass about things. :-(

Aden,

No, no definitely not. You were very informative.  Sorry for any ambiguity.

That link, though brief, was very clear. Thank you.

My ‘but I ain’t no yank’ filter wants me to use single quotes, but prior to this article I had no idea there was a difference (I’m not a typographer or writer) and I’ve always used double quotes.  Likely for the clarity reasons outlined in your link.

:)

Mark, Live Preview isn’t working for me.  I simply get the top of the comment bubble and no text.

Cheers

Unfortunately it is not even partly right to call the German “?” double-s. A double-s is a double-s also in German. The correct terms for the “?” are “Eszett” and “scharfes S” (sharp s). See Wikipedia for further information.

(Sorry for my bad English)