Re: [Groff] Handling '...'

[Ted Harding]

On 19-Jun-09 22:06:49, Keith Marshall wrote:
> Hi Scott,
> 
> On Friday 19 June 2009 23:22:38 address@hidden wrote:
>> I have an occasion where '...' is the first set of chars on a
>> line. _How do I rightly escape the first . so it does not get
>> translated as a macro '.' named '..' ?
> 
> You could write it as
> 
> \&...

You could also define a character called say \[el] ("ellipsis",
i.e. three dots on the baseline). This could be as simple as

.char \[el] ...

or you might prefer to play with the spacings to get a better
effect, such as

.char \[el] .\h'0.1n'.\h'0.1n'.\h'0.1n'

which (I think) looks better than just "...". Then you don't need
to bother about remembering the "\&" if it's at the start of a line.
You may also want to pad it with some space on either side (you
can use \h'X' for this, where "X" is a distance like 0.1n).

Note that the effect depends on the font. In particular, in a
fixed-width font (like Courier Roman, \f[CR]), your "..." will
come out with each dot spaced on by the fixed width of a character,
and will look bad. In that case moving the dots closer together,
as in

.char \[el] .\h'-0.25n'.\h'-0.25n'.

would produce a better result.
Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 19-Jun-09                                       Time: 23:47:45
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------