Ellipsis Styling

MusicBrainz Style
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Had some ellipsis styling questions:

Do we use unicode or 3 periods?

How do we use spaces? Chicago says to put spaces between each period, AP says to treat it as a 3-letter word with no spaces. If we treat it AP style, do we put spaces between the ellipsis and the words surrounding it? If so, where?

And Then… I Went to Work
And Then … I Went to Work

How about if it comes at the start of a title?

…And Then I Went to Work
… And Then I Went to Work

When ellipsis are used at the start of a track title, do we capitalize the first word regardless? …Baby One More Time doesn’t seem to have any sentence prior to the title, but … And their Eulogies Sang Me to Sleep absolutely does, so should this be styled as … and Their Eulogies Sang Me to Sleep as the style guide’s example of Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter does? Using the above example:

… And Then I Went to Work
… and Then I Went to Work

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I don’t know what are AP (and Chicago, maybe newspaper stuff), but your link says:

The AP Stylebook says to treat the ellipsis as a three-letter word, with spaces on either side of the ellipsis but no spaces between the dots.

But in my experience (French), there is a space only… after the ellipsis.
And yes… Unicode is better, IMO (Alt+0133 on Windows), it will not break between periods.
If you want spaces between each period and before the first one also included, make sure you are using no-break spaces.

So it’s more simple to use… the unicode character. :wink:

The auto guess case will do it this… way.
If you think there is strong artist intent to make them different, well… make them different. :slight_smile:

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the Unicode… is also better because it’ll display properly in filenames :wink:

with:
image
without:
image

in general, I only put a space after the ellipsis, unless the ellipsis is the first character, for example:

there are exceptions though… on the spine of the release below, there’s obviously no space on either side of the ellipsis, which is probably why it’s listed…that way most everywhere, including Wikipedia and Spotify.

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There’s a great ‘guess punctuation’ script here that automates Unicode ellipsis:

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