When formatting ebooks in Word, do not attempt to use spaced ellipses. Use Find Next to go through the doc and change only the ellipses that occur within sentences and skip those that end a sentence, have punctuation (comma, period or question mark), are closed by a quote mark, or already have a space. In the Replace field: Ctrl+Alt+.( hit the space bar once to insert a space) ( press the three keys simultaneously, it will create an ellipsis in the field) If all your ellipses within sentences are joined up, or some have spaces and others don’t, you can use Find/Replace to insert spaces and make everything consistent. Unfortunately, it is your responsibility… Really weird spacing with unsightly chunks taken out of sentences. Responsibility… Mister Jones, and not your pleasure. What can happen in an ebook is that the device will interpret the string with the ellipsis as a single entity that shouldn’t be broken when the text wraps. Unfortunately, it is your responsibility… Mister Jones, and not your pleasure.
Even though it’s grammatically correct to type this: If you intend to use Word to format an ebook, I highly recommend you get in the habit of inserting a space after ellipses that occur within sentences.
Click Okay, Okay again, and now whenever you type three periods Word will insert an ellipsis for you. Check “Replace text as you type” and select from the list the option to change three periods into an ellipsis. Go to File>Options>Proofing and select AutoCorrect Options… From the menu select AutoCorrect. The cure for this is to use the ellipsis character consistently in your Word docs. When it’s on my device, however, with my preference settings, the text alignment is different, and there could be orphans throughout the book. The text might line up in such a way that the proofreader never runs across the orphans. It can occur in carefully proofread books, too. It’s not a throw-the-book-at-the-wall type of sin, but it can be annoying. The biggest difference is that where an ellipsis character is stable with three periods this can happen:
If you look very closely you can see the difference. Despite being an actual character, it looks like three periods. In Word, and especially in Word docs being formatted for either ebooks or print-on-demand editions, ellipses can be troublemakers.
This isn’t a grammar blog so for information on how to use ellipses, here’s a pretty good article.