[mb-users] Correct typography

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On 9/12/07, Mika Heiska <kilualmighty at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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).
>
> 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.

Actually, I don't much like the ellipsis from an aesthetic point of
view (they're too close usually for my eye), but I find them quite
useful for exactly the reverse of your reason: I can use them at the
end of filenames. I'm forced to use a drive that's shared with
Windows, so I can't have a dot at the end of a filename. Ellipsis are
allowed, however. (I'm forced to use only Unicode-aware applications
because I have lots of non-English music, anyway.)

Not that it's a big issue, this _can_ be easily fixed in the tagger
both ways (by the way, Nikolai, can you link the script you talked
about?), just wanted to mention it.

-- Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.