Field guide / Rule 10 — Ellipses
The three dots that mark a trailing thought or an omission are not three periods you type in a row — they are a single character, drawn with the spacing already built in. Get it from the keyboard and it always comes out a little wrong.
The ellipsis (…) is a single glyph, and a type designer spaced its three dots to sit right in running text. Type three periods instead and they jam together — ... — too tight to read as a considered pause. Add spaces to fix that and they drift too far apart — . . . — three lonely dots. The real character is the one that was measured for the job.
Legal citation is the one place that wants the opposite. The Bluebook marks an omission inside a quotation with three spaced periods — . . . — held together with non-breaking spaces so they never split across a line. That is a genuine, rule-bound exception, so our engine never touches dots you have already spaced out: type the Bluebook form and it survives untouched. (A dedicated Bluebook mode, which builds that form for you, is on the way as an opt-in.)
Type three or more periods in a row and we set the real ellipsis character — a stray longer run collapses to one, too. Anything that isn’t a run of dots is left exactly as it was: your spaced Bluebook periods, the dots inside a filename, and every ... inside code or a code block.
Three periods become the real character, spaced right.
A longer run of dots collapses to a single ellipsis.
Spaced periods (the Bluebook form) are left untouched.
A dot inside a name is not a run of three — left alone.
In short
An ellipsis is one character, not three periods jammed together or spaced apart. We set the real glyph wherever you type a run of dots, and we keep our hands off the periods you deliberately spaced — because in a legal citation, those are doing another job.
Want to see it on your own text? Convert a document and read the cleanup report — every ellipsis we set is counted there.