New Literotica House Style for Ellipses?

[KenNicottii]

So what’s going on with the way Literotica displays an ellipsis symbol? I use ellipses regularly to denote hesitation in dialog. I find them particularly useful when punctuating dialog during sex—especially when a character climaxes.

I compose in MS Word and have always just typed 3 periods, hitting the space bar both before and after the ellipsis but no space between the dots. I don’t consciously use the glyph (U+2026 character or keystroke shortcut Ctl+Alt+.) and have never seen the software make a visible change when I type 3 periods—the way you can see certain keystroke combinations convert to an en dash or em dash. I paste my whole story in the submission box after manually adding HTML code for italics, bold, etc.

In my recently posted story (“The 8 x 10 of Darcy O’Dell, Ch 01”) all of the ellipses were converted to a ‘no space before/space after’ format:

“The sex was... like I was on another planet.”

What I submitted was:

“The sex was ... like I was on another planet.”

In my prior story, ”Queen of Diamonds” the ellipses were rendered exactly as I submitted:

“Umm ... let's see ... uh, the queen of diamonds?”

Both AP and CMOS style say spaces before and after—although it looks like I’ve been creating the ‘no spaces between the dots’ ellipsis that AP wants you to use. In general I like to follow CMOS style since this is a fiction website, but I really don’t want to slow down to use extra keystrokes to create their version of an ellipsis, particularly if Lit is going to convert it to a non-CMOS version anyway.

Consistency above all, of course.

 

[KeithD]

Neither one of those is publishing style. Publishing style is (space)dot(space)dot(space)dot(space, unless the last dot is terminal). Every example in my Chicago Manual of Style (CMS 16, 13.51 through 13.53) shows publishing style, as noted.

I have no idea about a Literotica style on this. I use publishing style. And as far as I can see, they are still posting that way if the author provides them. They posted that way in my story that was published here today.

 

[Voboy]

I'd just keep on typin' and not worry about it. Lit will do what Lit will do. I'd feel annoyed about it if they rejected work and then told you to change the style yourself, but if they're going to do it for you?

Nah. Why worry?

 

[NotWise]

Nah. Why worry?

Ditto. Worry about something else.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

I compose in MS Word and have always just typed 3 periods, hitting the space bar both before and after the ellipsis but no space between the dots. I don’t consciously use the glyph (U+2026 character or keystroke shortcut Ctl+Alt+.) and have never seen the software make a visible change when I type 3 periods—the way you can see certain keystroke combinations convert to an en dash or em dash. I paste my whole story in the submission box after manually adding HTML code for italics, bold, etc.

Interesting. Pretty sure Word turns three successive periods into the ellipsis character for you when you type the final one. There's no visible change (at least not in my default font), but if you move back with your cursor it should now be one character instead of 3 individual ones. Unless you might have turned that off manually? I know there's a list of those automatic conversions somewhere in the settings and you can add or remove entries yourself if needed.

I know some parsing happens when you hit submit, but I do think it's weird it would remove spaces. You sure they don't exist in the file you copied?

 

[ElectricBlue]

As pointed out on a separate thread

“The sex was ... like I was on another planet.”

can leave the ellipsis as an orphan on a line of its own, if the text line-wraps.


Whereas

“The sex was... like I was on another planet.”

will wrap the word with the ellipsis.

Whether that's the reason, who knows. I always use the latter nowadays because I know it works for digital text, ie: Lit. I'm not sure how consistent I was with earlier content, and as KeithD points out, his print based formatting is also accepted.

Use what works, and if Lit changes it, so be it.