OT: Ellipsis Points

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

This is OT, but I have a query that I believe several
of you are well-qualified to respond to.

A friend of mine is organizing and editing a
manuscript, with a view towards possible publication.
The result will essentially be a memoir, but it is
heavily based on a voluminous quantity of
correspondence over several decades. This is not a
copyright issue at all, as she owns and controls the
material at this point. (The letter writers are long
deceased.) It is a style and format question. A
great deal of material has to be selectively
condensed, for length if nothing else.

She showed me what looked like an excerpt from a sort
of manual of style, downloaded and printed out from
the internet about a month ago. It was prepared by a
small press in Australia, offering detailed guidelines
for those preparing manuscripts -- particularly those
manuscripts that might be destined for routing to
small and university press publishers. The idea being
that certain formatting guidelines make a manuscript
much more presentable and improve its chances of being
considered. The style manual excerpt ran to about 4
pages, on the subject of "Ellipsis Points", making it
(to this relatively untrained eye) a more detailed and
thorough treatment of the subject than 98% of what a
Google search is going to pull up. I was going to
insert the URL here, as a kind of shortcut referencing
my questions, but I find that in the intervening
month, this Aussie small press has apparently gone
belly up, and the site is no more. My attempts to
locate this same text archived somewhere else have
been unavailing.

This mini-treatise covered the various uses of
ellipsis, but the usage that concerns us here is the
indication of jumps over material that was deleted for
reasons of brevity, relevance, or redundancy. And
there would be quite a bit of that. Such notations
can be either to keep things clearer and more honest
for the reader, or for a publisher's own editor, or
for future reference notating that additional material
was once present in specific places.

To start off, my own question is whether there exists
some internationally recognized symbol to indicate
this, other than ellipsis ? I thought I might have
seen something like that in the past, but I don't
recall for sure. It would *not* have been a standard
punctuation mark, though, more like a symbol -- if I'm
remembering something that actually exists.

My friend handed me these additional questions:

1. What size margins ? 1" all around ? Horiz. line
spacing, especially between paragraphs ? (Some early
test sections overly packed the page, and with too
small a font, I think.)

2. Size of Top & Bottom space ? (There are no
footnotes.)

3. How do you indicate when words or sentences were
removed from the text to shorten it. (I think I've
already covered that, above.)

[Assuming the use of Ellipsis:]

4. I read that there should be 3 periods and 3
spaces. If the deleted words are after a full
sentence, is the first period right after the last
letter ? Are there still only 3 periods including
that one ?

5. If the next part of the text is not a new
sentence, is there a space before it ? Is this true
also even if the next part begins a new sentence ?

I think that should do for now. However, this also
left me wondering -- whatever formatting procedure is
used -- whether it would become tiresome or grating
after awhile ?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can shed some good
light on this subject.


Jordan