Talk:Tech/News/2014/30

Something to include

It would be nice to announce mw:Requests for comment/API roadmap to get input from as many API users as possible. Anomie (talk) 20:06, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Will do. odder (talk) 22:57, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

"slugs" really ?

May be this word "slug" has some connotation in English, but please don't use that word here, meake things simpler to undersand ! In fact I can't really understand what you really mean with this word in this context. This just looks like personal "jargon" from Ed Sanders, not intended to be documented more...

And don't let others translate it litterally (« limace » in French, really ???).

Immediately I interpreted it as a phonetic transformation of "slang" towards "bug", just to bypass slang language filters. This is not even comic and in fact troublesome; as if you were insulting readers, and it's not the purpose of theses tech news. verdy_p (talk) 17:51, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

@Verdy p: It is, however, the name. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slug#Noun meaning 11. Unfortunately no-one has translated this to other languages, so I can't give you the correct translation into French. Your assumptions about readers notwithstanding, we've explained this concept to users many times without difficulty. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:24, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Your link to Wikitionnary is not convincing at all (I can't find any relation with Ed's jargon here). Even in English you're too far away from the intended meaning, and in fact the word is absolutely not necessary here when you need to explain it further. The association with the unvertebrated animal is not clear enough: is it its form, or the track it leaves behind when slising over a surface? And in fact isn't just related to a specific and tempory presentation of the feature where you cna see an empty line with hollow dotted line emphasized when hivering it with the mouse (this mouse hovering effect is unrelated to the correct bug because this is related to the behavior of a keyboard event which occurs even when this line is not hovered with the mouse or another line is hovered by the mouse cursor).

As well you're talking about "cursor", which is also the worng word (the "cursor" is the icon showing the position of the mouse pointer), the icon showing the effective current insertion position is a "caret", not a "cursor" (except in text-only terminals where the insertion point is curectly moved with the mouse without separation from the caret). verdy_p (talk) 18:34, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

@Verdy p: P.S. Aha, the term in German is "Reglette" apparently. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

@Verdy p: It is clear you either didn't read or didn't understand my comment, which is a pity. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

I have read it, the dedinition 10 in English Kitionary is unrelated here where it means a correction mark in the side margin, and not a vertial spacer bar used to separate and lock rows of metal types in typography. Even in English, the terme "slug" is misused here and we are not speaking about corrector's marks (that are typically like wacy lines or parenthese like symbols in the margin, or check marks in the large side margin to emphasise indicates the position of another mark *within* lines (such as wavy underlines, deleted words to replace with those in the margin...~

Do not confuse this with uninked metal types used to compose a page layout and create correct alignement of rows and fairly distributtion of interlining over a page.

The term "réglette" (reused in German with the capital an no accent) is actually coming from French which is a diminutive of the French term "règle" ("straight rule" in English, on which you'll lock sliders or tabs, or with measurement graduations, or without any mark and just used because it has a solid straight border that helps drawing lines with a pen).

I have read your comment even if you have inserted your response after mine in time but visually before (you've played with the posting order, I've restored it!). verdy_p (talk) 20:58, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Visibly your did not read me correctly, when you replaced "cursor" by "mouse pointer" which is even worse!

Ed was speaking about "cursoring" (another personal jargon) to refer in fact to the "caret", i.e.certainly NOT the mouse cursor itself. The bug is clear that the issues was about keyboard actions (such as pressing backspace, or moving with left and arrow key).

The visible "hollowed" line (with the dotted border and light blue background) that appears when hovering an empty line with the mouse is NOT a "slug" in English for the typographic sense as it does not mark any correction in the text and does not move the insertion point, it just gives a user feedback that if you click there, you may move the nsertion point (caret) to that position. If you don't click, the caret does not move at all.

What was corrected was the placement of the caret (the flashing vertical bar) when you move or perform some edit actions by typng with the keybaord .

Ed's "cursoring" jargon really means "placement of the insertion point" and has nothing to do with the mouse cursor or the fact that you may hover an empty line elsewhere with a dynamic visual effect, or the fact that there's some vertical spacing added in the editor to allow this hovering (this is what German translates in "Reglette" in typography, but only for the final rendering to place and balance vertical margins or to balance spacing between words in line-justification; but still not what Engish calls "slug" in typography for **visible** correction marks added by correctors within the lateral margins, without even using a "reglette" for printung the page).

----

Actually the German and French "réglette" is a physial tool you use before locking rows on a metal type composition plate: it is a metalic ruler on what there are sliding tabs all with the same size and in form of wedges with slanted sides. You insert the wedge art of the sligning tabs between words on a line to create equal spaces. then you lock the rows vertically so the glyph in metal types will no longer move, and you remove the réglette with its sliding tabs; and can reuse it to compose the next row.

The réglette is also used to space lines with equal spacing (double spacing is made using wedges whose angle of the border has a double sine value but generally they are created by inserting horizontal rulers (that print nothing) between rows, but that can also be justifeid vertically with the réglette along with other lines with printed types. But here again these hoontal réglettes that are are placed temporarily before locking rows of types are not "slugs". Here again that réglette is not kept on the plate, it is just a helper for aligning and spacing lines in a balanced way and it is removed before inking the plate, or order to avoid accidental droplets of inks on the paper.

However the large réglette is replaced by small "space" types placed only at start and end of the row, near the margins, and these two small types, placed in the margins may sometimes have a glyph: these are the English "slugs" which can reproduce corrector's symbols in the lateral margins, but they never take the fill row length. Most of the time these small types are slightly elastic to avoid the fully composed plate to break and have metal types exploding around, under heavy pressure (and notably for rotating plates placed on a cylinder) !!! Frequently these small slugs were made of wood rather than metal (when not used for printing anything in the margins but just to maintain thel, they helped preserve the costly meta types in good shape and still create enough rigitity to the composed plate)!

Note: I've worked in the sector of book and newspaper publishers and in France for about 15 years. I've seen everything they've used in the past (before using now computers for nearly all), and that they still use for artisitic editions for example to restore old precious books kept in museums (generally only for their cover printed on leather and other thick materials). For engravings on thin paper, today's laser printing can be used with a chemical process to produse the plates (e.g. for printing tickets for costly sport/music events with technics similar to printing money or for beautoful multicolor engravings in artistic books using more than the typical CMYK 4 to 7 inks in newspapers and photo magazines; but frequently a dozen inks or more).

verdy_p (talk) 00:41, 19 July 2014 (UTC)