User talk:Dan Nessett

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 * --Your friendly ProofWiki WelcomeBot 13:40, 6 March 2012 (EST)

Style pointers
Now there's some stuff there to comment on, there are a few items which you might want to take on board:

a) Use dollar signs rather than "less-than math greater-than" as math delimiters (or anything else). There are good reasons for this: the main ones being 1. it's quicker to type, 2. "math" style delimiters don't get rendered properly in transclusion pages.

b) One sentence / statement / idea per line. This may sound silly, and very few people coming to ProofWiki can get their heads round this to start with. But it makes it easier to follow the proof.

c) Display equations are left-justified but indented, rather than centralised. (This is because the shortness of lines draws the eye to the left.) To indent, start a line with a colon. More colons = more indent, which is what the convention is on talk pages.

d) Lots of stuff is in displaystyle. Even inline code is better in displaystyle. So integrals, fractions, summations, all the stuff which has a compressed format inline, is made to be displaystyle.

e) Anything in parenthesis needs a \left({ and a }\right) round them. Yes I know it's fiddly and many consider it unnecessary. But a) it makes for consistency of style, b) it's an instant check to ensure your parentheses are balanced, and c) when cutting and pasting, and putting something big where once was something small, the brackets will automatically be sized as appropriate. And it's worth making the reminder that use of \big, \Big, \Bigg etc. is completely unnecessary because \left and \right automatically size everything properly.

But all that is documented in the house rules: Help:Editing/House Style. There's loads of stuff.

As for copyrights - couldn't give a damn, myself, but I understand that others feel the need to respect them, so if there is a requirement to add a citation to the page being copied, then such a citation would need to be added to the page, and (as has happened so far) a template would need to be generated. (For a good example of where this was shown to be needed, look up Urysohn's Lemma.) I never bother to cite a reference to wikipedia a) because the latter is too transitory and b) because very little stuff comes from there anyway. I know little about Citizendium except that I believe it "works a bit like wikipedia". As I said earlier, if there is a need to add a citation to work which came from there and that Citizendium owns the copyright on, then give me a link to it and I'll sort out a template. --prime mover 16:20, 8 March 2012 (EST)


 * Thanks for the helpful comments. One question though:


 * The theory pages and proofs had equations that were indented. I removed these because I have a 30' screen and all of the equations appeared in the center, which looked weird. However, from your comments above, it seems you want indented equations, so I can revert to the imported text and work from it. I would like to decide on which is the correct revision to work on before proceeding with further editing, so I don't waste editing effort. Perhaps you would be willing to take look at the original and latest revisions of one of the pages (say, User:Dan Nessett/Sandboxes/Sandbox 1) and let me know which contains the correct markup. Dan Nessett 17:49, 8 March 2012 (EST)


 * It appears that  :$$math$$  behaves different from  :$math$  essentially (even, the math tags apparently take precendence over the nowiki tags, how inconvenient). The latter indents only as much as the colons at the start of our comments do, but the former centers the equation. The latter is the desired behaviour. I guess it's easiest to take the original and run a replace command on the 'math' and '/math' tags to dollar signs. Concerning some strings of equations, it is a good idea to look at Template:Eqn. Example use is abundant over the whole site, a few 'Random Proof' clicks should suffice. --Lord_Farin 17:58, 8 March 2012 (EST)


 * See a) above: replace all the ...  tags with dollar signs. Under the rendering tool used on this site (MathJax), is deprecated and does not work properly. This is important so do that first.
 * Having done that, see c) above. Put a colon before each line you want indented. You will find that a colon in front of a line written using dollar delimiters for your LaTeX will indent it the way you want.
 * Take a look at some examples of most of the other pages on this site. Use "Random proof", for example, and examine the LaTeX. See how it's done, get a feel for how it's structured, go and do thou likewise. --prime mover 18:01, 8 March 2012 (EST)


 * I have created a Citizendium attribution template ( Template:Citizendium ). It is very simple, but solves the problem. If you want to make it more complicated (e.g., so it handles multiple articles in the same reference), put it into a house style, or change it in some other way - feel free. Dan Nessett 14:26, 9 March 2012 (EST)

I am having trouble using \displaystyle. The parser doesn't appear to recognize it as a command. For example, see the first line in Workspace 1. Can you help me? Dan Nessett 15:27, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
 * I was just about to come your way.
 * I'm not sure why it wouldn't work, but I suspect your \limits might have given it indigestion. It's a command I've never bothered to use myself, it doesn't seem to add anything much.
 * Also note that in order to save time and effort, and incidentally it makes it easier to read, I usually (and the house style endorses it, because I wrote it) remove curlies from around parameters in integral limits and top/bottom of fractions when they are single characters, And $d$ as a differential operator is rendered $\mathrm d$, and needs a space before it. Your integral then:
 * $\displaystyle \int_{-1}^1 x \ \mathrm d x$
 * --prime mover 15:31, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
 * I understand it just doesn't work for you? It does for me. Let me do some research ...--prime mover 15:33, 12 March 2012 (EDT)


 * Any progress on the research? I could simply edit the page according to the other house style rules and not change the display equations (i.e., keep them with dollar delimiters). But, I don't know if that is acceptable. Dan Nessett 00:52, 16 March 2012 (EDT)


 * No, sorry. It seems only to be a problem for you, because when I add that displaystyle field it works fine. What browser are you using?
 * I wouldn't worry. Once it's a proper proofwiki page in our standard style, the problem will probably go away. Does the displaystyle command fail to render on your browser in general, or just on that page? --prime mover 03:25, 16 March 2012 (EDT)

When I look at other proofs, the equations containing displaystyle are bracketed by dollar signs (for example, see Triangle_Inequality_for_Generalized_Sums). This is not how displaystyle use is described on the House Style editing help page. When I added the bracketing dollar signs, the equation displayed properly. So, I suspect others have run into this problem and have solved it silently. Dan Nessett 13:35, 16 March 2012 (EDT)


 * The house style page has been corrected; glad that the problem is solved. --Lord_Farin 15:31, 16 March 2012 (EDT)


 * There was a reason for it to have been put on the help page without the dollar signs - it was causing transclusion to misbehave. It was assumed that the reader, understanding the philosophy behind markup languages, would understand that \displaystyle was a LaTeX command and be up to speed with fact that it needed to be within the dollar sign.
 * Strangely, I added the displaystyle to the equation which had been allegedly causing trouble, and seen it working for me, but then it was reversed out again straight afterwards by the OP. From which I had assumed that the change I had done was inadequate.
 * I will bear in mind that contributors to this site may need more explicit instructions, and try to write the instructions more carefully. My bad. --prime mover 15:48, 16 March 2012 (EDT)