I was just reading about text formatting here, and the following is stated about ellipses:
Therefore, you cannot enter ‘ellipsis’ by just typing three dots, as the spacing would be wrong. Instead, there is a special command for these dots. It is called
\ldots
:
Not like this ... but like this:\\ New York, Tokyo, Budapest, \ldots
Alternatively, you can use the
\textellipsis
command which allows the spacing between the dots to vary.
The page provides no further information about how one might actually vary the spacing between dots using \textellipsis
, and I can't see any difference between the outputs produced by \ldots
and \textellipsis
. So, my question is: what is the difference between the two commands?
In particular, I would like to know:
- Do the two commands ordinarily produce the same output?
- I've heard of a package called
ellipsis
; is it only by using this package that one might alter the spacing of\textellipsis
?
\textellipsis
is specific for text, while\ldots
can be used also in math mode. Actually, in the default setup,\ldots
is equal to\dots
, which in turn is equivalent to\textellipsis
in text, and to\mathellipsis
in math. All these are high-level commands intended to be redefined when needed, e.g., when a different font/encoding is used, or by packages like amsmath.