FORMATTING forum questions/responses.....

[GlennSprigg]

What ever my 'knowledge' I was ignorant of certain 'Formatting'
of text within questions/responses.....  I'm SURE all main contributors
already understand, but for the other BEGINNERS, see......

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Alphabetical_list_of_all_bulletin_board_codes

For instance, if you are trying to show numbers to a power, then instead of seeing
  18 to the power 12, or 18^12, you will see...   18¹²
(written as   18{sup}12{/sup} but with square brackets instead of curly brackets )
(The sup meaning superscript)
There are many more !!!!!   

[Rerouter]

Still for most things, formatting is the icing on the cake, making a good question that people will actually try and solve is the hard part.

Too many years of answering questions on my part means I'm horrible at writing them in a way people will reply to.

If you can get a 2 page rolling discussion that stays on topic, I would see you as a master wordsmith,

[Zero999]

The super and subscript formatting is also useful for fractions: ²/₃,⁵/₈,⁹/₁₆ etc.

[Ian.M]

EEVblog also supports MathJax for writing more complex equations. See https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/so-now-we-can-get-mathy-in-here/

[NivagSwerdna]

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< You learn something every day!

[tpowell1830]

I have been trying to figure this out... hmm does this work?

   

EDIT: Sadly, no, I only wanted the link to show, not the huge YT screen...

[metrologist]

just slightly OT, but I noticed some of the large YT video screens show the video time. I thought it was a new thing they added, but I rarely see it.

[ucanel]

Another subject about this that bothers me,
even highly contributed forum members does this;
they are writing a detailed description of a wire-component connections
instead of sharing a simple schematic of what they are describing,
as an engineering forum I would prefer universal and easy to understand language that is schematic.

[Zero999]

Another subject about this that bothers me,
even highly contributed forum members does this;
they are writing a detailed description of a wire-component connections
instead of sharing a simple schematic of what they are describing,
as an engineering forum I would prefer universal and easy to understand language that is schematic.

In some instances they might not have a schematic and don't have time or the tools handy to draw one.

[ucanel]

In some instances they might not have a schematic and don't have time or the tools handy to draw one.

DaveCad is always an option,
who has not got an pen and paper and a mobile phone to take a photo.
If you would said that is because of laziness I would agree.

[Ian.M]

DaveCad is always an option,
who has not got an pen and paper and a mobile phone to take a photo.
If you would said that is because of laziness I would agree.

I'd rather parse a text description of a netlist than suffer another poorly lit blurred and shaky photo of a schematic drawn on the back of an off-white envelope with a crappy pen or 2H pencil by someone who's never met a ruler.   It doesn't save *ANYONE* time or effort if you have to faff around with the schematic for ten minutes in Photoshop to get it to the point where you can distinguish between connections and crossovers and actually read component values.

Also those quickly snapped photos of schematics almost invariably have excessive file sizes which are burdens on both the server (unless hosted elsewhere^*) and the bandwidth of everyone viewing the topic

Producing a readable schematic takes time and effort, and many novice questions would go unanswered if one was required here whenever a circuit with more than two two terminal components was being discussed.

* Offsite images have their own problems.  e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/30/photobucket_charging_400yr_3rdparty_pgs/

[Zero999]

Yes, I've often get frustrated having to process a poor photograph of a pencil drawing to make it readable.

In some instances they might not have a schematic and don't have time or the tools handy to draw one.

DaveCad is always an option,
who has not got an pen and paper and a mobile phone to take a photo.
If you would said that is because of laziness I would agree.

Phone data can be expensive and is often limited. Text uses a faction of the data, as a photograph, so it often makes sense to describe the circuit in a few lines, especially if it's very simple. I think people are too lazy to read and want everything handed to them on a plate.

The above is also a pain when people post overly large fuzzy photos of schematics, >10M pixels at 32-bit colour, when a sub 1M pixel, 1-bit monochrome line drawing would do.

[ucanel]

I am glad to hear your point of wiev about this subject thanks.

I agree the unnecessary big file size and blurry photos and bad schematics
but that is not my concern at the other hand there is poor text description is an issue either.

Maybe it is because of English is not my main language and schematic seems easy to understand for me,
And also I have a very bad photographic memory so I can not easily imagine what was desribed.
That is only a suggestion, you may have your own style,
I said my argument especially for the topic owners,
as an answerer when I saw a topic  I would prefer easily unaffordably understandable questions,
hard job must be done by the question owner.

[Ian.M]

That's one of the reasons that LTspice is rather popular here.  Even without its simulation capabilities its a reasonably easy to use free tool for drawing schematics that has a reasonably compact and well documented ASCII file format.   It does have a few flaws, the most glaring of which is its lack of any easy way to tell if a part is original built-in or is a third party addon that must also be supplied to the recipient

As you have difficulty visualising circuits from English descriptions, I strongly encourage you to explicitly ask for a schematic if you are posting a question that needs a circuit in its answer.

[GlennSprigg]

If you can get a 2 page rolling discussion that stays on topic, I would see you as a master wordsmith,

I hear you mate. And yes it is nice to sometimes stay on 'topic'. Although other times, it is 'interesting'
where the conversation goes some times !!!! to add some diversity  :-)
I don't think any of us think of ourselves as 'Master Wordsmiths' but of course we like to get across what
it is we want to get across.  The PROBLEM with 'typed' text is that it is just that!  It does not show any
real 'inflection' of tone/sarcasm/humor/ light heartedness (or seriousness) as required/meant.....
and so is open to massive interpretations/misinterpretations, right or wrong.  Hence.....
Often 'exaggerated' smiley-faces and exclamation marks  :-)

In general, I was happy and in agreeance with the responses here, and so wish to add......
I didn't realize how many other links there were to basic Forum formatting.... (My ignorance :-) )
I learn't so much more than I initially posted.  Thanks to all !!! Glenn

[EEVblog]

EEVblog also supports MathJax for writing more complex equations. See https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/so-now-we-can-get-mathy-in-here/

David found some sort of message during the server move checking that MathJax is no longer support and may cease to function?

[Ian.M]

Without having access to that message, I see the forum is currently using the cloudflare hosted MathJax library v2.71.   I suspect that updating to the current version before the old version gets depreciated would be advisable.   

There's nothing on https://www.mathjax.org/news/ that would indicate any concerns for the future of MathJax, so unless a future SMF update totally and unresolvably breaks MathJax integration I wouldn't expect it to be very difficult to keep MathJax support working here.