Saturday, January 4th, 2025

brightknightie: Woman typing in an office with other women around her , 1930s (Fanfic workout)
A very kind person generously commented on a 2008 story of mine on the AO3 ("Milepost," FK, Tracy & Natalie), and when I re-read it to refresh my memory -- it was a fill in an LJ ficathon for a prompt by Wiliqueen -- I discovered that all the ellipses are gone. Wherever an ellipsis originally sat, there is now a blank space.

Has something happened to ellipses over the years? Some old formatting or code become incompatible? This story is from the days when I wrote in MS Word (presently, I write in Google Docs). Probably, the missing ellipses were the MS Word character for an ellipsis with which it would have automatically replaced the three periods I would have typed.

I usually re-read my stories in their entirety on posting to scrutinize for exactly this kind of thing. (You know the old truism: Typos are invisible until publication.) Of course, this particular story was uploaded later and backdated -- the AO3 didn't open until 2009 -- and perhaps I was loading several at a time and not paying as close attention as I should.

Could it be that all my vintage stories have blank spaces where their ellipses should be? Eeek. If so... to what extent do I need to go back and fix them, as a courtesy to anyone trying to read them from now on?

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brightknightie: At dawn, a white knight raises her lance (Default)
Amy

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