Hopefully, the last time about dots

Today, the Designer of All Russia made a typographical note on the fan in his personal blog in Livejournal.

So, guys. The ellipsis consists of three points. “Knock, knock, knock” - these are the sounds your keyboard should make. In no case can not use the symbol called the ellipsis (...). This symbol alone contains all three points in itself. He invented for monospace dialing and saving bytes, however, it is impossible to use it for layout of books, as well as newspapers and magazines.

Actually, half of the lemmings began to happily accept the order of the Designer of All Russia.

Robert Bringhurst, "Typography of Typography"

Currently, most ready-made fonts include, among other signs, ready-made ellipsis (a sequence of three dots on a font line). However, many printers prefer to make dots themselves. Some dial three points without jabs ... with a normal word break before the ellipsis and after it [norm of English typography - approx. Heath]. Others beat the point. . . thin spacias. The third spetsatsii (a third one by the pin) are prescribed by the Chicago Manual of Style, but this is another manifestation of Victorian eccentricity. In most cases, the Chicago dot is too wide.

The ellipsis typed without jingles looks good not in all fonts and outlines. In small text type points - for example, in 8-point footnotes - as a rule, it is better to add a space (up to one-fifth point) between points. Additional space may also be needed among light, open fonts, such as Baskerville, and a smaller space in combination with rich fonts, such as Trajanus, or when typing in bold.

So right Artemy Lebedev, or wrong?
')
Actually, as we see, everything depends on the font, and three points without manual kerning can look much more miserable (for example, sparsely) than the ellipsis developed by the author of the font. Therefore, if you do "tuk-tuk-tuk", then manual kerning is almost always needed. I'd love to believe in the compositors of newspapers and magazines. :) In my opinion, employees of not very high qualifications (which are the majority in the profession) are always better to use ready-made dots.

In principle, if the font designers always correctly prescribed kerning pairs for a sequence of points, then the dot symbol could not be used, always dialing three points.

Regarding the set for the web, Artemy was silent about him in the context of the ellipsis. Apparently, implying that he does not give such a specific recommendation for the web. In view of the foregoing, such a recommendation and there would be no place to take it: with a low resolution of on-screen typography and with a limited set of standard fonts, it is not known what is better - a relatively narrow ready-made ellipsis, or a wide one because of the points.

As for the sign history, the U + 2026 character originally appeared in Unicode to ensure backward compatibility with the Xerox Character Code Standard coding, and it encoded three points of refinement (a sequence of points connecting the book's table of contents with the corresponding page number). However, he was quickly tied to the dots of other outdated encodings, including the Macintosh Character Set. The ellipsis is present in some obsolete encodings and is absent in others, therefore the statement that the ellipsis symbol was used to save bytes, for the time being at least unfounded.

Well, the last is semantics. Still, ellipsis is a separate punctuation mark with a separate function, so I personally prefer to use it in electronic document management. Naturally, for printed matter, this moment does not matter.