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

Le mer. 11 nov. 2026 à 08:22, Laurenz Albe <laurenz(dot)albe(at)cybertec(dot)at> a écrit :
>
> Submitting the patch to pgsql-docs is good enough; you don't need to
> re-send it to -hackers (but you can do that of course). You can have a
> commitfest entry point to a message in any PostgreSQL mailing list -
> just reference the message ID.

ack

>
> I think your choice of "cleartext" and "plain text" is fine. I personally
> would feel better about "plain-text" whenever you use it as an adjective
> (like in "a plain-text file") and "plain text" for a noun (like "write a
> file as plain text"), but I am not a native speaker, and my feeling could
> be the German-speaker's preference for compound words. Also, the borders
> between noun and adjective in English are blurry ("a fun thing").
>

In strict grammatical terms, you are entirely correct! It "should" be
"a plain-text file". Unfortunately, computer folks appear to have
standardised on "plain text" without a hyphen in this case. I've
followed this convention rather than the more grammatically correct
version to be consistent with the way in which it is most commonly
used.

> There are three occurrences of "non-plain-text" that you changed to
> "non-plain text". This feels wrong, since to me the hyphen ties stronger
> than the space. I would read that as meaning something like "compound text".
> I'd suggest that you rewrite those sentences to avoid the construct.
>

Agreed - rewriting makes sense. None of the alternatives that I found
for the construct appeared any better.

> You could add some of the considerations that led to your choice of words
> to the commit message, as well as "Author:", "Reviewed-By:" and
> "Discussion:" tags (see other commit messages). It would save the
> committer some keystrokes.

Will do. Thank you for the suggestions.

Regards,
--
Karen