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

Le ven. 6 nov. 2026 à 15:49, David E. Wheeler <david(at)justatheory(dot)com> a écrit :
>
> > Just to confirm my understanding:
> > 1. We should use "cleartext" and "plaintext" throughout, not "clear-text", "clear text", "plain text" or "plain-text".
> > 2. There is at least one case where "plaintext" is used incorrectly in place of "cleartext”.
>
> I thought these were synonyms, in contrast to “ciphertext”. Should we not pick one to replace all of the others? Searching around a bit, it seems like “ciphertext” and “plaintext” are most often contrasting terms, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext.

I think you're right, and that makes the task much simpler (that was
my initial understanding, before I found various articles suggesting
that cleartext and plaintext were not the same). I see that the
cleartext Wikipedia entry redirects to plaintext:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaintext, which implies that plaintext
may be the preferred term.