I have gone through some of the questions on SO related to etc and other similar short hand characters. Everywhere is it problem specific. So I would like to know, is there a special command in latex, without defining out own command for using etc.
some thing goes for versus, a vs b ? how do we represent them?
Thanks.
There is no command for this but \dots. In my eyes, dots are too informal for publications. Just use etc.\ in the middle of a sentence and etc. at its end. Or \&c.\ respectively. Versus should always be vs.\. In any case, make sure to use a custom command for this. As you seem to care for such things, you might change your mind later on and then you will be grateful for a custom command.
vs.\ is sometimes simply v.\ , especially in American legal publications. As usual in typography, "always" is a bit strong.
– dgoodmaniii
Nov 21 '16 at 11:30
\␣) appends glue as if spacefactor were 1000. Instead of control space I suggest restoring the spacefactor to what it was before placing the dot and delimiting the control sequence by a token whereafter spaces get tokenized: \def\vs.{vs.\spacefactor=\the\sfcode`\v} and \def\etc.{etc.\spacefactor=\the\sfcode`\c}. If you don't have the spacefactor restored, the spacefactor of a dot ending a sentence might erroneouly be used in situations where no spaces but closing parentheses follow the abbreviation-dot - e.g., : Animals (zebras, gnus, etc.) are in the wilderness.
– Ulrich Diez
Nov 21 '16 at 13:56
e,t,c,.? – percusse Nov 21 '16 at 10:29\textdiscount(from thetextcomppackage) to denote "versus". – jknappen Dec 20 '16 at 16:35