The discussion revolves around Discourse’s automatic conversion of two consecutive periods (..) into a three-period ellipsis (…), which users find misleading, especially in programming contexts. Ed_S argues that the TWO DOT LEADER (‥) would be more appropriate. pt2023 reports the issue, noting that even with ‘enable markdown typographer’ disabled, the conversion persists in existing posts. Canapin clarifies that disabling the typographer stops new conversions, but existing posts require rebaking to update the display. The consensus is that while code blocks prevent the issue, rebaking and user education are needed to fully resolve it.
I see two consecutive period characters are converted into HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026) - I was expecting for them to be left as is. But if they must be promoted to a character, I think TWO DOT LEADER (U+2025) would be more correct: that’s ‥ instead of …
Here are two periods which come out looking like three: ..
(Filed under bug, but obviously not causing me a serious problem.)
I have Discourse page where two dots appear as three once the text field is entered.
I have already unchecked ‘enable markdown typographer’ in the admin settings. Within back-ticked code blocks, this auto-changing of dots will not happen; however, not all posters know this, and it can cause confusion because the page discusses programming syntax. I get that code will ideally be put in backticks, but sometimes syntax still gets mentioned within a paragraph.
Is there a way for these kinds of autocorrects to be fully un-enabled?
Well, perhaps embarrassingly, it does seem like the double dots are now not being changed, even outside the code.
I had tried to edit previous posts where the two dots were being converted, but they did not update. However, new posts do seem to be OK.
Disabling enable markdown typographer works as expected.
Posts will keep their … unless you rebuild HTML, since the raw content of the post contains ..
If you want all the posts to have … changed to .., I’m afraid you need to rebake them all after disabling enable markdown typographer (you could select only the posts which the raw contains .. with a rails command though).
Depending on how often this is done, I’d rather fix myself others’ posts and educate the users by asking them using codeblocks 