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When I read manga, I sometimes stumble on speech bubbles like the one below. What does it mean? I have never seen something like this in other comics or graphic novels.

"......" [vertically] / "Ryner"

senshin
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jcubic
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    Those seem to be [ellipsis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis) to me... Except that they appear vertically because Japanese write vertically. – JNat Apr 18 '14 at 11:08

1 Answers1

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That's just usual dots like this "....". That's because originally, text in manga (which is in Japanese) is written vertically, like this:
enter image description here
Usually, I interpreted it as "The character have [something to say/opinion/thought/knowing some information] about the matters in hand, but choose not to say it yet". Well about why people that type it keep it vertical, that's their choice. And in the case with the screenshot you gave, IMHO typing it vertically looks better than typing it horizontally.

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    taking from the image in the question the reason was probably not to generate so much white space in speak bubbles, if "......" was written horizontally you would either need to redraw the page to change the size of the bubble or squash the dots leaving a large amount of white space. the same can be applied to the guy saying "Ryner" – Memor-X Apr 23 '14 at 22:22