Word's ellipses (...) are too compressed

Question

Word's ellipses (...) are too compressed

Anonymous

The default Word (2010) ellipsis looks like this: ...

Most publications have spaces between the periods, like this: . . .

I can create my own symbol easily enough, but then the ellipsis potentially breaks in its middle if it's at the end of a line (so one or two of the periods stat on the previous line). In other words, the ellipsis won't stick together, as the default symbol (...) does (and as ellipses should).

Any ideas?

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Answer 1

Jay Freedman 207.6K Volunteer Moderator

Use nonbreaking spaces (Ctrl+Shift+space) between the periods. If that's too wide, there is a selection of nonbreaking spaces of various widths in the Insert Symbol dialog, in the General Punctuation range from Unicode 2002 to 200A.

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Answer 2

The publications to which you refer are probably not using ellipsis characters, but series of three periods with spaces between them. The width of an ellipsis character is not controlled by Word, but by the font of which it is a character. If you really want the wider form, you can use periods with non-breaking spaces (created via Ctrl-Shift-Space) between them. Do note, though, that in Word 2013, such strings are liable to expand/contract if you use paragraph justification. This might be important if you're sharing the document with such users.

Answer 3

Anonymous

Thanks!

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Answer 4

Anonymous

Thanks! The Ctrl-Shift-Space worked great.

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Word's ellipses (...) are too compressed

2 additional answers