Re: Good beginner doc-hacking task: clear-text vs. cleartext vs. clear text vs. plaintext etc..

> On 11 Nov 2026, at 16:16, Karen Jex <karenhjex(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> I can attempt to split out cleartext and plaintext entries if there's
> appetite for that, but I suspect that may actually confuse things
> rather than clarifying them.

Agreed; we should write the docs for postgres users, knowledge of terminology
in cryptography should not be a prerequisite.

> Instead, I propose the following glossary
> entries to define the way in which we're using the terms:
>
> plain text
> Unformatted, human-readable text that consists of a sequence of
> printable characters in a character encoding such as UTF-8.
>
> cleartext
> Unencrypted data; data that exists in an unprotected, readable format
> during storage or transmission. Sometimes used as a synonym for
> plaintext; the input to an encryption algorithm.

Sounds good. I was trying to make the cleartext entry specify that it is
generally data which is intended as input to processing, but I wasn't
particularly successful in creating anything which reads better than what you
have above.

--
Daniel Gustafsson