Many of our items (especially those in our ontological models) have lengthy definitions and/or descriptions (sometimes many hundreds to - occasionally - thousands of characters) in the Notes field. We developed a mechanism to allow us to break these notes into separate portions. We created a "widget" (in this case the string "<--+-->"). By convention, text before the widget is the normative definition of the item (the notional "25 words or less"), whereas text following the widget is used for discursive narrative providing more detail about the item, its usage etc. We have a script to set the length of the visible notes to the start of the widget. Thus we only provide the full notes on the appropriate diagrams and no or minimal notes on the majority of diagrams.
The problem is that the script does such a good job of hiding the (larger) detail that often users aren't aware of "but wait, there's more!". We feel it would be most useful to provide an ellipsis character at the end of the shortened note display to indicate that there is more text but it is not visible. The use case I have outlined is our specific usage, but the use of the ellipsis to indicate a shortened note is of general applicability.
Thoughts?
Report,
Paolo
