Re: add a character and a string definitions for an ellipsis

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:38:54 -0600
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260212213854.ga7uuckfdehpdk4z@illithid>
[self-correction]

At 2026-02-12T15:23:33-0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2026-02-12T21:10:37+0000, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote:
> >   Seen in contrib/rfc1345.tmac as
> > 
> > .char \[,.] \[u2026]\"     HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (Vim 8.0.0062)
[...]
> >   I found neither '\*(El' nor '\*[El' strings in my man[1-8] directories
> > from Debian.
> > So these are not common there.
> 
> I'm not enthusiastic about this.
> 
> 1.  It's not portable.  Anyone opting into rfc1345.tmac usage is
>     necessarily exercising groff extensions.

Sorry, I went too fast and thought you were suggesting:

.ds El \[u2026]\"     HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (Vim 8.0.0062)

...in clear contradiction to what you actually wrote.  My bad.

That still leaves point 2.

> 2.  groff_man_style(7), which I feel applies generally:
> 
>      • Why doesn’t the package provide a string to insert an ellipsis?
> 
>        Examples of ellipsis usage are shown above, in subsection
>        “Synopsis macros”.  The idiomatic roff ellipsis is three dots
>        (periods) with thin space escape sequences \| internally
>        separating them.  Since dots both begin control lines and are
>        candidate end‐of‐sentence characters, however, it is sometimes
>        necessary to prefix and/or suffix an ellipsis with the dummy
>        character escape sequence \&.  That fact stands even if a string
>        is defined to contain the sequence; further, if the string ends
>        with \&, end‐of‐sentence detection is defeated when you use the
>        string at the end of an actual sentence.  (Ending a sentence with
>        an ellipsis is often poor style, but not always.)  A hypothetical
>        string EL that contained an ellipsis, but not the trailing dummy
>        character \&, would then need to be suffixed with the latter when
>        not ending a sentence.
> 
>            Instead of...              ...do this.
>        ──────────────────────────────────────────────────
>        .ds EL \&.\|.\|.         Arguments are
>        Arguments are            .IR src‐file\~ .\|.\|.\&
>        .IR src‐file\~ \*(EL\&   .IR dest‐dir .
>        .IR dest‐dir .
>        ──────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
>        The first column practices a false economy; the savings in typing
>        is offset by the cost of obscuring even the suggestion of an
>        ellipsis to a casual reader of the source document, and reduced
>        portability to non‐roff man page formatters that cannot handle
>        string definitions.
> 
>        Unicode defines an ellipsis code point, and some fonts have an
>        ellipsis glyph, which some man pages have accessed non‐portably
>        with the font‐dependent \N escape sequence.  We discourage their
>        use; on terminals, they may crowd the dots into a half‐width
>        character cell, and do not render at all if the output device
>        lacks the glyph.  In synopses, missing ellipses can mislead the
>        reader.  Dots and space are universally supported.

Regards,
Branden
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