Talk:2109: Invisible Formatting

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 20:35, 8 February 2019 by 108.162.246.215 (talk) (What text editor is Randall showing?)
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This reminds me of the person who used l (lower-case "L") instead of 1 for data entry at some business. Amazingly, the computer accepted it (BAD programming!) and it wasn't found out until the end of the tax year, when all heck broke loose! 162.158.75.136 14:50, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Some programming puzzles are often solved with stuff like this: AΑ Fabian42 (talk) 15:19, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
"l" (lower-case "L") is a valid suffix to integer literals in C and derived languages. It indicates the number is of the "long int" type as opposed to a plain "int". Because C automatically upconverts the "int" type into "long int" when needed, the "l" suffix is rarely used. The result: "long int a = 1;" and "long int a = 1l;" mean exactly the same thing, and both statements are perfectly standard and won't raise any warning from compilers. "ll" (double el) is also a valid suffix, this time for the "long long int" type. GuB (talk) 15:39, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I went to this page, expecting it to be self-referential. Was not disappointed. Fabian42 (talk) 15:19, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Some markup conversion tools don't handle hidden bold spaces correctly. This HTML to Markdown converter is an example: https://anthonychu.github.io/to-markdown/ It converts <b>a </b> to **a ** instead of **a** . 172.69.62.10 15:40, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Hah, this comment is not mine! Somehow I have your IP now. 172.69.62.10 17:47, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Were the periods in the beginning there for a specific reason? Netherin5 (talk) 17:42, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

The user 108.162.245.16 thought it was a good idea for some reason. Glad you fixed it. I finished the job 172.69.62.10 17:46, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I've had this happen when writing papers. Bold. Unbold. Later backspace into the hidden bold space and everything typed after gets put in bold. If a professor gives you a page count instead of a word count, you can make the punctuation in your paper bold (or increase the font) to add some extra padding that might go unnoticed. Don't actually do this if you can't convey your thesis in fewer words. 172.69.210.52 18:11, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I hated when Microsoft Word took over and lacked a real "Reveal Codes" like WordPerfect used to have. I'm kind of like Randall, I think about those behind-the-scenes things that lots of companies like to try to hide from the user, and I like the power to do something about them. -boB (talk) 18:58, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

When I saw the strip, I immediately thought of Word Perfect because its brain dead way of inserting formatting as special codes inline with the text. Hit "reveal codes" and it would reveal a string of bold on / bold off codes because it wasn't clever enough to optimise them away. I assume Word does it differently, perhaps with attributed strings and so doesn't need the reveal codes function so you can manually fix the mess the program has a made.

In Microsoft Word, where the majority of people folks would have experience with selecting and bolding text, the cursor appears as an "I-beam" and not as the "mouse pointer arrow" depicted by Randall. Also, in Word double-clicking a word does select the following space(s), but when bold is applied it is applied only to the selected word, NOT to the trailing space (even though the space was selected when the bold was applied). So selecting just the word and un-bolding would not leave a bolded space behind, since the space was never bolded. Clearly Randall's example is in some editor other than Word. Since Word is where most people have familiarity with selecting and bolding text, something should be added to the explanation noting this and speculating on which text editor Randall is actually showing. - 108.162.246.215 20:35, 8 February 2019 (UTC)