TTS software and the pain of non-breaking spaces
Another “please don’t do this” to keep in mind when formatting fics; please use either an actual ellipsis (…) or three periods (...) over spaced periods (. . .) or, worst of all, non-breaking spaced periods (. . .).
Most TTS stuff will properly treat an ellipsis as a silent short pause, which depending on the software may or may not be longer than a space between words (or equal to the silence length of a sentence break). Most are also smart enough to treat three periods and three spaced periods as also silent. And some fail utterly at treating anything with a non-breaking space the same as a space. Also even with just normal spaces, some are a little bit less intelligent, and will probably see the first period as a period, and therefor silent followed by a pause, but the remainder as stuff-to-be-pronounced, so that, for example, but might he. . . will be read as some variation of either but might he period period or but might he dot dot dot (variations mostly depending on whether there’s also a space or non-breaking space before the initial period, or four periods used instead of three). These are annoying to listen to, especially if the author is using a lot of ellipses in their text.
For a related reason, if you feel you absolutely must do a double space between sentences, and are using a non-breaking space to accomplish it, please always have the normal space first and the non-breaking space second; not all TTS software will understand that punctuation followed by a non-breaking space should be treated the same as punctuation followed by a space. It sees the non-breaking space as a character and treats “. Meanwhile” as if there is no sentence break there while “. Meanwhile” has a proper sentence break (hexadecimal code instead of actual character used for visibility purposes).
Though if you’re using a spaced out ndash or hyphen (“ – ” or “ - ”) in place of an mdash (“—”), I highly recommended starting off with a non-breaking space for the first space, as that way ereader software usually keeps the ndash/hyphen with the text preceding it with any potential linebreak happening at the space following it. Also note that some ereader software is stupid, and does not treat the mdash like it does ndashes and hypens, so that it sees “room—was” as a single word block, and if it falls at the end of a sentence will drop the whole of it down a line rather than doing a line break after the mdash.
And as a related bonus mention, if you’re doing one of those runallthewordstogetherbecausewhynotourbrainsmakesenseofitanyway sentences, then it is worth knowing the hexadecimal code for a zero-width space () so that you can use it, and have the above have hidden break points so it shows up on screens more sensibly AND so TTS software knows how to read it aloud properly: runallthewordstogetherbecausewhynotourbrainsmakesenseofitanyway