Who would have thought that three dots could cause so many problems?
Most of the Aethernet Magazine writers use the ellipsis …
The Guardian Style Guide suggests leaving a space before and after the ellipsis.
In the Aethernet style guide the ellipsis is always followed by a space
“Is it… ?”
“Yes… ”
Preparing texts proves to be an interesting Emacs exercise.
It’s easy to search for three dots … , but there also exists a unicode character …
Now, as everyone knows, Emacs characters are saved as integers. You can insert any character on Emacs by hitting C-q and then the appropriate code in octal, in this case:
C-q 20046 gives …
If you want to enter the codes in denary, evaluate the following: (setq read-quoted-char-radix 10)
Evaluate the above and now…
C-q 8230 gives …
Better yet, place the code in your .emacs file. Set the value to 16 if you want to quote in hexadecimal.
It’s easy to find a character’s value:
C-x = gives information about a character under the point.
For example, the ellipsis gives
Char: … (8230, #o20046, #x2026, file ...)
There are easier ways to insert non-keyboard characters using C-x 8
C-x 8 ' e prints é C-x 8 `e prints è C-x 8 ^ e prints ê C-x 8 " u prints ü C-x 8 / / prints ÷ C-x 8 C prints © copyright
The above are just a few examples
C-x 8 C-h to see all characters
If you want to hurry (dépêcher in French) you might get tired of typing C-x 8
all the time. The following allows you to omit the C-x 8
section
M-x set-input-method latin-9-prefix
Okay, what now… ?
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