[mb-users] Correct typography

[Mika Heiska]

Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> there was a time when MusicBrainz didn't know what Unicode was. Luckily, 
> the times have changed and it's no problem now (given a proper 
> filesystem) to keep all of your music properly tagged and named, even 
> you have russian, chinese, english, latvian and some hebrew and korean 
> tracks in your collection.
> 
> I'm a heavy user of PicardQt, so that about 80% of my music is MBIDed. 
> Recently, I've added a two-liner to the PicardScripting wiki page which 
> converts triple-dots to ellipsis, which is the correct typographical way 
> to express what was meant by three dots. But then it stroke me: what is 
> MusicBrainz's standing point considering typography in general? Would it 
> be ok to "fix" triple-dots in the database, insert em-dashes and 
> non-breakable spaces everyplace appropriate? It is rather 
> straightforward to convert these characters to their replacements (e.g., 
> '--' for the em-dash) in taggers and scripts while it definitely not as 
> easy to convert the other way around (e.g. non-breakable spaces).
> 
> Any comments on this? I know I'm a Unicode freak, so bear with me :)
> 
> Greets,
> 
> Nikolai.

I don't know about anything else, but I personally dislike ellipsis (and 
the likes), and if I notice one in the database I usually mod it to 
three dots. I don't think there are rules about this stuff (or have I 
just completely missed them) but to me ellipsis are unusable. Even if 
MBz supports them, lot of applications don't and often break when trying 
to load a filename with ellipsis on it.

This is my experience anyway, perhaps I have been unlucky.

~Mika