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Re: diagnostics: prefer "…" to "..." if the locale supports it
From: |
Hans Åberg |
Subject: |
Re: diagnostics: prefer "…" to "..." if the locale supports it |
Date: |
Fri, 11 Oct 2019 22:37:59 +0200 |
> On 11 Oct 2019, at 22:14, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> diagnostics: prefer "…" to "..." if the locale supports it
>
> Is this really a win? I normally used fixed-width fonts, and on my platform a
> string like "ABC…DEF" is all-too-easily confused with "ABC_DEF" if there are
> no underscores in the neighborhood. (I am using Fedora 30 with default fonts.)
Curiously, in Lucida Grande, the two looks identical.
> For what it's worth, the Wikipedia manual of style
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Ellipses> says,
> "Wikipedia's style for an ellipsis is three unspaced dots (...); do not use
> the precomposed ellipsis character (…) or three dots separated by spaces (. .
> .)." Although Bison is not bound by any such style guide, I've found the
> Wikipedia style manual to be a good source for advice when trying to write
> clear documentation that is readable on the web.
The WP style rules are somewhat contradictory, for example they do the opposite
with en-dashes, using the Unicode character U+2013 instead of ASCII, and also
in situations where traditionally it is not used. Traditionally, headers are in
sans-serif if you bother and the body in serif, but they do the opposite.