User talk:Debenben

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Again, welcome!

. . . . and please accept our apologies for this very belated message of greeting. — Ineuw talk 03:09, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Changing the formatting of the equal (=) signs in PSM

The reason <ce>=</ce> or <math>=</math> were used to format the math symbols, was to be as closely as possible to the original text, although on some screens and with font formats it doesn't really matter.

Personally, I don't care one way or the other, but I think your efforts are a waste of time considering that you went to all the trouble of replacing the <ce> and making minor math edits, when you could have validated the pages.

It may be that you are doing this because of the mistaken belief, (like I was when I began the project in November 2009), that we are paid by piecework and not by the hour. :-) — Ineuw talk 03:09, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

@Ineuw: Thank you for welcoming me. That the appearance of math tags is different from the text in most browsers is a bug which we are trying to fix: phab:T195861. I hope we will eventually end up with a math extension where the whole equation can be written in math tags and gets a typographic quality comparable to equations in printed books and papers.

The ce tag is the predecessor of chem which means that ${{\ce {A=B}}}$ (<ce>A=B</ce> or equivalently <chem>A=B</chem>) represents a double bond between A and B and not $A=B$ (<math>A=B</math>). Unfortunately there are also some other bugs where chem equations get a wrong formatting. We are currently going through all of them manually and in the process I also change other "non-standard" usage as a precautionary measure since often it is faster than checking if it gets the correct appearance.

I think in general, it would be a good idea to not always aim for equal appearance. For example I changed some math written in bold. Bold symbols however have a distinct meaning and are for example used for vectors. If something is not-bold in the original it should be not-bold regardless of what the fonts look like.--Debenben (talk) 07:56, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations, they are much appreciated and agree with you now that I understand the issues. (Knowledge liberates) — Ineuw talk 00:18, 9 July 2018 (UTC)