I use a simple string: .\^.\^. and precede it with \& if at first
of line. Or you could add the \& in every case. It's much easier
to read in source files than figuring out what the string is --
especially for someone who "inherits" the file for later maintenance.
Using .\|.\|. is too "spread out", but the \^ space looks very nice,
and is much simpler. If you use the vi editor, you can define an
abbreviation so that whenever you type ... the editor changes it to
the expanded form for you.
I've been using vi for near 25 years now and still love it. With
that and groff, who needs Microjunk's Word?
Clarke
(Ted Harding) wrote:
On 19-Jun-09 22:06:49, Keith Marshall wrote:
Hi Scott,
On Friday 19 June 2009 23:22:38 smo...@sacredlabor.com 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.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 19-Jun-09 Time: 23:47:45
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