Generating the ellipsis character on Mac, Windows, and Linux

By Thomas Steiner. Written on Wed Sep 07 2011. Technical

Maybe this comes in handy for someone else besides me: to generate the ellipsis character ("…") on a Mac keyboard, press Option + ; on a QWERTY keyboard, and (more logical) Option + . on a QWERTZ keyboard. Option is also known as Alt for all Mac newbies. Typography geeks might love this, but I'm also looking at you, anonymous Twitter user, where every character counts... (← three dots, pun intended).

Addendum 1: Danny Ayers points out that on Linux you can use Ctrl + Shift + u (for Unicode) and then 2, 0, 2, 6, Enter. Or &#x2026; in HTML.

Addendum 2: Georg Portenkirchner points out that on Windows you can press and hold Alt, and then press 0, 1, 3, 3 on the numpad, and finally release Alt. He writes five keystrokes for three dots—that's just stupid (and probably why nobody uses the correct ellipsis). Nothing to be added to that…

The ellipsis character is also known as "three dots", "triple dots", "dot, dot, dot", or \ldots in LaTeX, or as HTML entity …).