Question: So there is a debate about how to edit ellipses in posts on the site. This has come to a head [in this latest post](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129353/is-on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand-a-cliche-to-be-avoided).

Here is what needs to be decided as an official policy so that we don't end up with edit wars/community wikis from too many edits.

What do we want for a site policy?  

1. use three periods ...  

2. use three periods with a space in between . . .  

3. use a narrow-space plus dots (separate each dot with U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE)  

4. use a proper UTF8 ellipsis …  

5. let the poster decide which method to use and otherwise leave it alone

Answer: 
Personally I could live with any of 1,2 or (preferably) 5. Expecting people to use symbols that are not easily available on all keyboards and setups seems unnecessarily complex and, which is more, will simply be ignored by the vast majority of users.

If I had to choose, I would go for 5. While I appreciate correct punctuation as much as anyone and will be quick to edit out things like "I am wondering.........." which are so common in internetspeak, I feel that requesting strict adherence to typographical conventions is not really reasonable on a public Q&A site. In any case, the conventions themselves are not so clear here with different style guides [suggesting different variants](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_English). 

Then there are the various problems associated with some people not having set their browser to auto detect character encoding or who have set it to non UTF8 defaults. They won't be able to see options 3 and 4 correctly which makes these, in my opinion, more effort than they're worth.

Given that each of these options has its adherents and *all of them will be understood* I think the best option is 5.
Unfortunately, typography and ease of use are at odds here, plus different style guides and typographers disagree about the details.

The one thing that nearly everyone agrees on is that there should be **some** extra space between the dots, and it should **never** break across lines. The exact amount of space varies according to context and taste, but NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F) and NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0) are both reasonable choices. I prefer the latter because it's easy to type on a Mac keyboard (Option+Space).

I personally avoid the Unicode HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026) because very few typefaces actually have a well-rendered ellipsis glyph, so it's just as hard to type as other solutions **and** typographically inferior. For example, the ellipsis character in the question renders on my Mac indistinguishably from three unspaced periods.

Because there's no ideal solution here, I think it's usually best to leave ellipses alone when editing unless they are **grossly** incorrect. It's easy to actually make them **worse** if you're not careful (e.g., accidentally replacing non-breaking spaces with ordinary ones).

When writing new posts, I recommend encoding ellipses roughly in this order:

1. Separate periods with NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0) if you can type it easily (Option+Space on Mac keyboards, `&nbsp;` in Markdown): “. . .”
2. Use unspaced periods: “...”
3. Use HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026) – **not recommended** because it renders the same as unspaced periods in the ELU font, and it's harder to type (Option+Semicolon on Mac keyboards, `&#x2026;` in Markdown): “…”
4. Separate periods with NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F) – **not recommended** because it has rendering problems similar to HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026), and it's even harder to type (`&#x202f;` in Markdown): “. . .”
5. **Do not** separate periods with ordinary spaces.