Wednesday 16 July 2008

Three little dots

A couple of months ago, while participating in a copy-editors' discussion group, I learned that there's a keyboard shortcut for the ellipsis - the three little dots I'm so fond of using in my on-line musings.

Thankfully, I wasn't the only person in the discussion group who didn't know that if you type alt+; you get … but there were several people who expressed outrage that a so-called "Advanced" copy-editor didn't know that it's wrong to type . . .

The thing is, if you learned to type before computers became commonplace, and if the sort of material you work on (i.e. science and technical, rather than fiction and ephemera) rarely uses the … , then you probably never had cause to type alt+; - in anger or otherwise.

Still, I am always willing to learn something new … … …

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