A leader in

typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), an ...

is a series of

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

, usually

lines Line most often refers to: * Line (geometry), object with zero thickness and curvature that stretches to infinity * Telephone line, a single-user circuit on a telephone communication system Line, lines, The Line, or LINE may also refer to: Arts ...

dots Directly observed treatment, short-course (DOTS, also known as TB-DOTS) is the name given to the tuberculosis (TB) control strategy recommended by the World Health Organization. According to WHO, "The most cost-effective way to stop the spread of ...

or dashes, that are used as a visual aid to connect items on a page that might be separated by considerable horizontal distance. For example, dot leaders are often used in

tables of contents A table of contents, usually headed simply Contents and abbreviated informally as TOC, is a list, usually found on a page before the start of a written work, of its chapter or section titles or brief descriptions with their commencing page numbe ...

to connect section headings with the page numbers on which those sections begin. Most

word processing A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

includes a feature for the automatic generation of dot leaders. This word is pronounced , like the everyday word "leader" (person who leads), unlike the typographical term

leading In typography, leading ( ) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies. In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to inc ...

( ), which refers to the use of the metal

lead Lead is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metals, heavy metal that is density, denser than most common materials. Lead is Mohs scale of mineral hardness#Intermediate ...

Unicode

Although manual dot leaders are most often represented as a series of

full stop The full stop ( Commonwealth English), period ( North American English), or full point , is a punctuation mark. It is used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclam ...

characters, there are at least three

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

characters dedicated to the representation of dot leaders. These are U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER (․), U+2025 TWO DOT LEADER (‥), and U+2026 HORIZONTAL

ELLIPSIS The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...

(…), a three dot leader.

References

Typography {{Typography-stub