Subject: Re: "Unprintable characters" in dialog box
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Wed Jul 12 2000 - 12:49:06 CDT
wjc> I propose we change this to something more meaningful. Perhaps
wjc> "Invisible layout marks" or "Invisible formating marks".
sam> I believe that the standard name for these is "nonprinting
sam> characters", but I may be wrong.
I don't know about any standard for this, but MSWord from Office2000
(via Tools->Options) calls them "Formatting marks". Perhaps MS called
it something else in earlier versions. That seems reasonably clear,
whereas to my mind "nonprinting characters" or "unprintable
characters" seems unclear. In this day and age, I am personally more
inclined to take the word "print" more literally as indicating
something that only applies when you send something to the printer.
(It would make less difference when/if there is a really simple sort of
context-sensitive help, akin to Win32's "?" window decoration.)
Without looking it up, I believe that ANSI 3.64, which was the first
standard to describe ASCII, called the control characters "format
effectors". In Unicode land, they call them "formatting codes". And,
just to round things out, in FORTRAN, we had "carriage control
characters". (This entire paragraph intended only for humor value. :-]
None of these things are actually the same thing as we're talking
about, and the names are all user-horrible.)
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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