User talk:Hops Splurt

Kickstarter

Hi, I think you made the right decision at separting out the current drives. Ideally they wouldn't be in at all, but I thought it wasn't worth fighting the hordes of OOTSers updating just the one current project and not the other. Come the 21st and that section can disappear until the next time that Kickstarter hosts something that appeals to a geeky fandom.--Peter cohen (talk) 16:49, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Relativistic electromagnetism

Hi. Where exactly did you get parsing errors? I had a look at my revision again and everything seems fine. But we're probably using different browsers, skins, preferences, etc., so maybe you see something I don't. It would be nice to figure out the root of the problem so it can be avoided in the future. — HHHIPPO 09:55, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

The parsing error occurred on the 'v << c' expression in the line just before the expression for F_m. It is probably due to the use of the French quote character '«'. As you can tell from my comment on the undo I was under the impression that everybody could see this error (which shows in bold red on the page), including the author of the changes. That would have meant that someone made a change without checking the result. Luckily this is not the case. On the other hand this means that different users see different renderings of the math parts. Therefore I would like to urge you not to try to polish the appearance of the formulas, such as using 'F_\mathrm{m}' rather than 'F_m'. To many viewers the supposed improvement would not be visible or could actually make things worse, while for the editors the math code would be less readable. I think math formulas are a case where 'good enough' is good enough. It is the contents of the formulas that count, not their appearance. --Hops Splurt (talk) 10:38, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

ADDENDUM: After reading (bits of) Help:Displaying a formula it looks like the difference was caused by a different setting in My Preferences - Appearance - Math. With MathJax switched on the error does not show. With 'Always render PNG' it does. Note that the same help page also gives lots of information on the preferred use of codes for symbols. In particular the 'much less then' symbol should be coded with \ll, resulting in $v\ll c$. That solution should both give nicer looking formulas and avoid rendering errors. As for the problem of an error showing depending on user settings, this should probably be reported as a bug. -- Hops Splurt (talk) 11:22, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that's also what I figured: I used Unicode character U+226A ≪ MUCH LESS-THAN, which is fine in normal text, but apparently confuses the PNG renderer when used in a <math> environment. I agree that's probably a bug in the math extension, I'll avoid using it there. (Btw: that character is similar to, but not the same as U+00AB « LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK.)

About upright vs. italic indices: it's often difficult to find the right compromise between the correctness of the output and the readability of the source code, and defining the right line here requires much broader consensus than what the two of us could achieve. So I'll stick to the Manual of Style for now.

I don't have strong feelings about my edit, so I'll leave the article to you now. But I do think that things like making 'l' look different from 'I', removing redundant parentheses, and showing the remaining ones at appropriate size help readability. Maybe you want to reconsider if everything I did had to be reverted. — HHHIPPO 12:10, 16 February 2014 (UTC)