Re: diagnostics: prefer "…" to "..." if the locale supports it

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/11/19 10:35 PM, Akim Demaille wrote:
> > 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 (. . .)."
> I expect this to be for English.

Yes it is. In contrast, the French Wikipedia manual of style 
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Conventions_de_style> uses ‘…’ U+2026 
HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS without comment, which suggests that the single-character 
ellipsis is more common in French.

An ellipsis in a proportional font looks fine, but in a monospace font it looks 
odd in English – particularly in a context where an underscore would be 
plausible too. Part of the problem is that ellipses look like (fuzzy) 
underscores in some fonts. Part of the problem is that in some systems, unknown 
characters are displayed as underscore, so that if the font lacks an ellipsis 
U+2026 is displayed as an underscore which is doubly confusing. (This may be the 
problem that Hans reported in this thread.)

Since the confusion might be locale-dependent, perhaps all that’s needed is to 
modify the translator comment to not insist on U+2026 so strongly. That is, 
instead of saying “TRANSLATORS: use the appropriate character (e.g. "…") if 
available.” it could say something like “TRANSLATORS: Use an ellipsis 
appropriate for your language, remembering that "…" (U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS) 
sometimes misdisplays and that "..." (three ASCII periods) is a safer choice in 
some locales.”