RE: Truncating text with ellipsis

Since nobody more knowledgeable seems to answer this...


Well, ellipses are normally used when an *author*
truncates a sentence, or a list of some kind.
Other characters used for that:

0E2F	THAI CHARACTER PAIYANNOI (paiyan noi)
	= paiyan noi
	* ellipsis, abbreviation
0EAF	LAO ELLIPSIS
17D4	KHMER SIGN KHAN
	* functions as full stop, ellipsis, abbreviation

just to mention some of the more obvious ones (well,
those annotated so in the Unicode NamesList.txt).


Some software does use ellipses to indicate some
kind of truncation.  Personally though, I think it
is better to use some other way of indicating that
not all of the text is (or can be) shown.  Like
the text appearing (in a GUI) to be in a framed
"well", and the text can be scrolled, or having
left- and right-pointing triangles ("outside" of
the shown text in the UI!) indicating that there is
more text (or was more text).  I'm not sure how
international the latter would be, but I think it
would be better than to use any kind ellipses for that.

		/kent k


> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-international-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
> Jere.Kapyaho@nokia.com
> Sent: den 25 november 2002 10:19
> To: www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Truncating text with ellipsis
> 
> 
> 
> In Latin text it is common to indicate truncated text with 
> the ellipsis character (U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS). Is this 
> also valid for non-Latin languages? Are there different 
> regional conventions for such truncation, perhaps using 
> regional versions of the ellipsis (analogous to the 
> ideographic comma)?
> 
> To put it another way, if a user agent wanted to truncate the 
> rendered text, would it be acceptable to always use the 
> horizontal ellipsis character, regardless of the language? If 
> not, what other characters are there for this?
> 
> Best regards,
> Jere Käpyaho (Jere.Kapyaho@nokia.com)
> Mobile Software, Nokia
>