[Tex/LaTex] Ellipsis with a period/fullstop

mla-stylepunctuationspacingsymbols

While quoting how ellipsis should be used if few sentences are omitted in between. (ommissions are not clauses or words or phrases, but sentences). For example if there is a passage like: This is a book. That is a pen. That is my bag.

So, I am quoting now omitting the middlle sentence. The tex source code:

``This is a book.\ldots That is my bag''

Here is the tex output:

image

So in the above example if I use a period and \ldots, then the spacing between the period and ellipsis doesn't appear fine.

EDIT: 1
I'm following MLA style guide. And I am using mla-paper package.

Best Answer

From the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition, section 3.7.5. "Ellipsis":

For an ellipsis within a sentence, use three periods with a space before each and a space after the last ( . . . ).

As an example it shows:

Quotation Omitting a Sentence

In discussing the historical relation between politics and the press, William L. Rivers notes:

Presidential control reached its zenith under Andrew Jackson, the extent of whose attention to the press even before he became a candidate is suggested by the fact that he subscribed to twenty newspapers. . . . For a time, the United States Telegraph and the Washington Globe were almost equally favored as party organs, and there were fifty-seven journalists on the government payroll. (7)

So there are no [] or (). For my MLA papers, I have a macro for the "quotation-ellipsis":

\usepackage{xspace}
\newcommand{\el}{{\,\ldots}\xspace}

The small space \, takes care of some weird spacing in \ldots, that seemed to look best to me. \xspace makes sure it works as bla bla \el. and as bla \el bla., i.e. a space is added only if there's no punctuation after the macro. The ellipsis package might be even better for this purpose, but I've never really looked into it since this solution worked for me.

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