What is the advantage of using ellipses instead of three dots: …?
And the benefit of using the two options above?
Hello Brix!
The ellipses is a single character and looks better than three full stops in sequence. It’s a typographical thing.
Same for the em-dash. This is kind of a long hyphen that’s also looking better than two hyphens in a row. Note, however, that in some languages the use of an en-dash is more appropriate (German for example). In such a case, click the option off and define a substitution for double hyphen to en-dash, instead.
The smart quotes help you place the correct pair of quotes in your dialogs and quotations. Different languages use different quotation marks and these options help you to make your text look typographically professional. In French and German for instance quotes can be written in >> << marks.
All three options deal with the fine points of typography. If you are going to publish your book through a professional service, they will probably take care of these details for you. But those of us who don’t have that kind of help try their best to produce a typographically correct end product themselves.
The ellipsis is the proper symbol – three dots is just a convenient way to represent them for limited character sets, in the same way that you can use two hyphens - - to represent an en-dash –.
Hello NorbVor,
Thank you very much!
So this options should be used e.g. for Germany, if I understand it correctly:
And these for USA:
“abc” is shown twice here and „abc” as well, why is that, I cannot see any difference?
Thank you, brookter.
I suspect one is using "straight-quotes" and the other “curly-quotes”.
It seems the second / higher one looks differently:
Which one should one choose? It appears they cannot be replaced later properly with find / search and replace.
I have taken some time to sort out which of the smart quotes is used for what. Here is my result. First, let’s look at the smart quote alternatives in detail and in the order in which they appear in the list box of Scrivener’s Corrections dialog:
It is not very obvious, which of the alternatives is to be used for which language. The following table shows the Unicode coding of those quotes, their names and a selection of prominent languages in which they are used:
Some of the quotes are used in a language as an alternative to the primary quotes. Those are marked with “-alt” in the language name.
What I found remarkable is that the quotes in (4) and (8) appear to be identical, even the exact same Unicode characters. Also, I didn’t find any language for (5). I have used the following Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark
And interesting that the quotes for the primary language that Scrivener is used for appear as number 7!
So far my little research on the subject. I am sure that the linguists and typographers in this forum can contribute a lot more!
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What a great research! Thank you very much! Very comprehensive subject obviously.
So all questions answered at the moment. Many thanks again!