User talk:LpSamuelm

Welcome

Welcome to Bulbapedia, LpSamuelm! Here are a few links to help you get started:

Manual of Style The Manual of Style, or MoS, outlines the format of all pages on Bulbapedia. Need a hand? Our friendly team of staff are here to help! Talk to them if you have any questions or problems with Bulbapedia.

Signatures On talk pages, please sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~), or by using the "Your signature with a timestamp" () button at the top of the edit window. Userspace Policy On Bulbapedia, the ability to edit personal userpages is a privilege. Per our userpage policy, this must be earned by first making constructive edits to the mainspace. Once you can, remember to keep userspace edits (edits to User:LpSamuelm) to a minimum. For a complete list of policies and editing advice, please see the Welcome Portal.  Thank you, and have a good time editing here!   «ιɴsσмɴιαc» 10:57, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Monospace/Gen II save data

Do you actually have some "real" reason the tables under checksum shouldn't have the whole cells in monospace? Is there a actually some significant problem with "to" being in the same font? It's the easiest solution; it looks fine. I get that your intention is to put the font on the hex values, but I don't know any reason why it's so terrible that "to" be in the same font. In other cases, I'd be happy to leave "to" out; and that's possible here, but doing it is just more trouble than it's worth (AFAIK). Tiddlywinks (talk) 21:07, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, the reason they're in monospace at all is to set the hex values apart. tags are for just that - setting apart code. Having the entire sentence (which "[x] to [y]" is) in monospace makes it seem like it was taken straight from a .txt. Honestly I would've kept the tags even in the code-only cells in order to keep the formatting uniform, but it doesn't really matter as much there. So basically, to separate text content and code content.

Another formatting that would work, I suppose, would be to split the table up into a table with a "from" column and a "to" column - that'd be fine too, as the code and text would be separated in style in that case too. LpSamuelm (talk) 21:19, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

In lots of text, it's certainly worth setting apart the hex values. But in those tables, it's not (at all) hard to identify the relevant values, even with "to" in the same font. Can I ask you to just do something so that the code tags aren't used in the table? Either setting the whole row monospace again, or making from/to columns, or something. (Honestly, I tried from/to columns before and didn't like it. But...) I'll leave it to you, but those code tag formats are just too out of place in a table.

(P.S. If you removed the welcome template on purpose: please don't.) Tiddlywinks (talk) 21:26, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I really liked code tags in the table, at least. Felt consistent, and was pretty enough. But sure, if it makes you happy it can't be that bad. LpSamuelm (talk) 21:32, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Japanese holdovers

There's one thing I'm particularly confused about in your recent edit to Character encoding in Generation III. It's the bolded part below.

Characters on a dark gray background are, in all versions, unused holdovers from the Japanese encoding. They are displayed differently across versions.

It seems to contradict the "in all versions" part. Or are you talking about some sort of trivial differences somehow?

Tiddlywinks (talk) 18:54, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Ah, no, both statements are true. They are unused in all versions, but display as spaces in FireRed, LeafGreen, and Emerald. Perhaps I should change that to something along the lines of:

Characters on a dark gray background are unused in all versions. In Ruby and Sapphire, they are holdovers from the Japanese character set, while in Emerald, FireRed, and LeafGreen they (with the exception of 0xAF) simply contain spaces.

How about that? I'd have to do some editing in the beginning of the "Revisional differences", but the added clarity might be worth it. LpSamuelm (talk) 19:34, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm doing some moderate changes already anyway. I'll make sure it's accounted for. Tiddlywinks (talk) 20:26, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I figured you would! I'll swing past once you're done and make sure you didn't change anything for the worse. LpSamuelm (talk) 22:27, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Images

As a rule, can you please not use images from external sites in the future? Tiddlywinks (talk) 21:38, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Of course! I wanted to upload the characters myself, but as it turns out I (despite being auto-confirmed since long ago on the wiki) can't upload images. I asked an administrator, but I figured these would be fine temporarily. If you look at the HTML comments right by those images, you'll see I'm fully aware they should be replaced. LpSamuelm (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Just in case, I'll emphasize that they shouldn't really be used even as a stopgap. Thanks. Tiddlywinks (talk) 22:53, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Odd characters

Just to check, I don't suppose you'd know if the Italian _M (0x59) from the RS encoding is used in text anywhere? Or where the Pco (0x64) in French Emerald is used? I'm glad you figured out those ordinal characters before that I originally used images for, and I'd love if we knew about these as well, possibly for noting somehow. Tiddlywinks (talk) 21:38, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

And, vaguely related, but did you merely make a mistake when marking 0x60-0x63 as differing by region, or did you just forget to include them in the section below? Tiddlywinks (talk) 22:09, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

No mistake there specifically - I did however do a copy-paste goof, marking the Italian Pokéblock text as 0x7D-0x83 when it is in fact 0x5E-0x63. I'll fix that one once you're done with... whatever you're doing. LpSamuelm (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

The _M I have no idea about, and haven't looked for. Since it was removed from all subsequent versions, I assume it wasn't very important. "PCO" isn't a common abbreviation in French, so it'd probably be something Pokémon-specific. I thought it perhaps stood for "Pokémon Contest", but I looked for it and found nothing. Not in contests, not on summary screens, not the PC, not the Pokédex, not your Trainer Card, not the options menu, not berry mixing... Seeing as it was added in Emerald, it might be about the Sevii islands, although I highly doubt it.

The ordinal suffixes are at the very least used on the contest high score boards (in the contest halls), but they're probably used elsewhere, too - it's fairly probable that they'd be used in normal dialogue, too. You probably weren't wondering where those are used, but hey, there it is. LpSamuelm (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Found it! Pco stands for "points de combat", and is used in the Battle Frontier exchange desk. For example, a Blastoise doll (or should I say a Poupee Tortank?) is listed as costing 256Pco. LpSamuelm (talk) 22:45, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I think I get what you mean about the Italian Pokeblock text, so I fixed it too. I'll be ready to save once I've just uploaded and replaced the external images.

The Italian remains a mystery for now then. Thanks!

(On a side note, I'll guess that the in-and-out indentation you had above was meant to each be one advanced beyond the comment it was replying to. Around Bulbapedia, though, we generally prefer that all reply indents be strictly advancing (or reset if it gets very far). If you want to use the same indent after something of your own you recently wrote, though, that's probably fine usually.) Tiddlywinks (talk) 22:53, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

For what it's worth, it might stand for "Melle", the Italian word for "block". It might also not at all, though.

Oh, and please don't edit my indents citing some unwritten rule, as it's entirely subjective. Cite the manual of style if anything (or get your unwritten rule formally written down) - it contains nothing about "strictly advancing" indents. LpSamuelm (talk) 23:02, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Orderly indentation is a rule that's been enforced commonly on Bulbapedia, written or not. For now, I'll ask you to not undo it by my authority as a staff member. Feel free to redo the indent within the confines of my previous advice, though, or otherwise to appeal the issue to a higher authority if you like. (For what it's worth, I've asked for clarification on how we should "officially" respond to your challenge, but I have not currently received a response. If I do get one I'll be sure to let you know.) Tiddlywinks (talk) 00:55, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Gen III character encoding

I'm just gonna make this section generic so we can reasonably keep using a single section if we/I want rather than making more and more sections for each different new issue.

The main thing I currently want to ask is, what in the world are "small and narrow fonts" exactly? That's what I wanted you to explain when I removed it before regarding 0xB0 (… and ‥). Where does it happen? A concrete example, not just a vague/technical description.

I've also undone a number of your other changes from your most recent edit. An edit summary doesn't leave a huge amount of space to satisfactorily address many things at once, so if you remain unconvinced about one part or another, I'll be happy to talk here about it.

Tiddlywinks (talk) 00:55, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Sure, edited the other instances of dashes without spaces then, for consistency, if that's the way you're hell-bent on having it. I also changed it back from "iterational" - that is simply incorrect. Not a word. Even if it did work the way you think, it wouldn't mean anything different from "revisional" - nevertheless, I changed it to "version" to appease you.

I have no idea what "This is only about Em" in your edit summary means - the letter spacing is important on the 2-dot leader character, as it then appears much closer to its in-game appearance. The dots are very close together.

Let's not forget, by the way, if you get to change wording you think feels wrong, I do too. That "featuring" sounded odd.

Don't remove the paragraph on the quotation marks. Just as the sentence you wrote despite that information being in the tables, "with the exception of 0xB8, all inputtable text is identical between international and Japanese character sets", the little paragraph on the quotation marks provides clear answers and brings up something the reader might not have thought of otherwise.

Oh, and don't change things you don't know about - you edited FireRed and LeafGreen out of the list of games that print spaces for holdover characters, for some reason, which is wrong. Those are spaces in FRLG.

I also clarified the font difference thing, seeing as you were confused about that. It wasn't at all "technical", but there you go. LpSamuelm (talk) 01:20, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Iterational: "version differences" is hardly without problems either. It's moderately misleading to conflate games (also known as "versions" themselves) with revision "versions" of the same game. The best thing is really to find something that stays completely away from all that. Iterational is good. Let me ask, why do you say it's not a word exactly? Iterational makes perfect sense. Each game/revision's character set is an iteration of a previous one.

Em / spaces in FRLG: Sorry, I didn't realize Em (Emerald) overlapped with the font thing. I was talking about the unused values line. The whole table is established as being about Emerald only. It's misguided to add explicit FRLG and RS mentions—they're not the issue there. Supposing the mention of "Emerald" there is what's prompting your change, how about if we just change it to "Characters on a dark gray background are unused values that mostly display as spaces except in earlier games."? The talk about Japanese holdovers and which games can just wait for the iterational differences section, where that stuff really belongs.

Featuring: the characters don't have a dotted underline, the box does. An actual underline on the characters would be much smaller; or practically nonexistent for the unused values. I don't know if I can convince you, but I'll ask anyway if you can find your way to appreciating that distinction and letting it be "featuring"? (I'll try to think if there's any other options too.) Also, I think I don't like your change to "[they] differ between regions" because it's a more active verb than "[they] have regional differences". Does that change really matter to you?

Regional paragraph: the line about "all inputtable text is identical" is not the same thing. More than anything, those are two separate tables, which you'd have to move back and forth between to compare the inputtable characters. It's eminently warranted to shortcut that process. By contrast, the paragraph in question here is right before the table. As far as, "something the reader might not have thought of", supposing that refers to quotation marks changing if you trade, I kind of think, mainly..."And that hurts them how?" Besides that, it's also logically implied by things communicated already—that each game only has two character sets, and that native character sets are different as described in the regional differences table. To satisfy your concerns, though, we can move the comment relating to those quotation marks earlier where that exact thing is actually covered. Cool?

JP 0xB0: So. I'm in Firefox. (I don't know about you.) For me, what I see with the spacing you readded is, for all intents and purposes, basically NO space between the dots. It looks like one single unidentifiable character. It occurred to me to check Internet Explorer, and I saw that it does appear there that the dots are farther apart with the current spacing that you readded, and in the previous revision they're even a bit farther apart. However, what I'm seeing in Firefox is a FAR worse issue than the dots in IE (or whatever) appearing maybe-sort of far apart. I hope you understand that I will have to revert that part.

I'd also like to just make sure you know about edit warring. I started a discussion hoping to avoid us going further in an edit war—i.e., hoping you'd do us both the courtesy of trying to talk things out here and seeing if we could both reach agreements on any of these things rather than immediately jumping back to edit the page. This is much preferred if two people disagree. Just try to keep that option well in mind in the future. Thanks.

(Thanks also for clarifying where the narrow/small fonts were. I never really paid attention to such differences to notice that.) Tiddlywinks (talk) 02:45, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

I should also mention that I don't favor the wording "[value_x] displays as". I guess I think it makes it sound sort of like magic, or a magical occurrence. Most of the rest of the page already uses "prints". Is this also something you feel strongly about, or can we maintain that consistency? Tiddlywinks (talk) 02:59, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

"Iterational" isn't just "not without problems", the fact that it's a made-up word makes its very existence a problem. Change "version" to something else if you really want to, just don't choose a word that doesn't exist.

"Earlier games": It's important that the text mentions that the dark gray characters display as spaces not only in Emerald, but also in FireRed and LeafGreen. In your version of the text, that is mentioned literally nowhere. Not only that, but even if it were mentioned later, it is incredibly misleading to say that they display as Japanese characters in "earlier games" - FireRed and LeafGreen came out earlier than Emerald did, yet they don't contain the Japanese characters. Why even be so vague - "earlier games" - when you can simply say "Ruby and Sapphire" and be both accurate and concise? Don't.

Dotted underline: The characters do have a dotted underline. The fact that it's implemented as a border on a span is irrelevant. To the reader's eyes, the characters do have an underline that's slightly wider than the character itself. I should point out, too, that the boxes in fact don't have underlines. That'd be a border-bottom on the actual table cell, which isn't the case.

Quotation marks information: Mentioning it where it's actually detailed makes the most sense, of course. Don't remove clarity and information just to make an article shorter. "Concise" and "short" aren't the same thing - you're actively hurting the clarity and information content of the article by removing paragraphs like that one. Pointing out differences and their implications specifically beyond the contents of a table is not a bad thing; leave it.

2-dot leader: Yes, I am also on Firefox. Feel free to change the 2-dot leader to look more like a 2-dot leader on your computer. Don't leave it simply as "・・", however, as that simply doesn't reflect how the character looks in-game. Decrease the 0.5em value to 0.33em or something, perhaps (preview: "・・").

"Displays as": I'm very whatever about that whole thing. "Displays as" sounds entirely natural to my ears: if you put 0x01 in a nickname, it displays as "À". Mixing up "prints", "prints as", "displays as", and "is" (which is also used in the article) leads to less repetition and a more varied language, which of course is a good thing. If you'd like to change that based on your whims, however, sure. It doesn't matter a whole lot.

LpSamuelm (talk) 03:17, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

"Iterational": are you declining to answer why you think it doesn't exist?

"Earlier games": I'll put aside half of this part for now to keep this one fairly simple. You'll have to forgive me, but I don't understand what you're saying "Don't" about exactly... But am I right that just changing the line to, "Characters on a dark gray background are unused values that mostly display as spaces except in Ruby and Sapphire." would make this part good by you then?

Dotted underline: if I'm very lucky I may think of something else, but otherwise I'm gonna let "with" go. (I'm going to tentatively assume you don't care about the "differ" thing...)

Quotation marks information: Your ending here of "leave it" is also confusing me. Do you not agree to that paragraph being removed under any circumstances? (I.e., even if the info about the quotation marks were already mentioned above?)

2-dot leader: That alternative still isn't displaying right. You may have gone the wrong way. This looks legible to me, is it fine for you?   ・・.

(If I may be so presumptuous, I'd also like to suggest that compromise is great. If you can take even a half step back from "your" position and try to think of ways that we can both be happy, that'd be great. Even if you just see my solutions as wrong; try to think of some yourself too. =) Thanks.)

Tiddlywinks (talk) 03:59, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

It's so late it's early here. I'm going to bed now - I'll respond to this tomorrow. LpSamuelm (talk) 04:23, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Good morning!

"Iterational": Huh? I figured you would've looked it up by now. It's just about checking a dictionary, after all. For reference: Merriam-Webster and Oxford both have no entries for "iterational". It's not because they don't contain that form of the word, in case you happen to think so: in contrast, they do have entries for "revisional" and "iterative".

How about "Characters on a dark gray background are unused values that mostly display as spaces except in Ruby and Sapphire, where they are holdovers from the Japanese character set"? Having points of information in multiple places for clarity is not a bad thing.

Dotted underline: Sure, if you for some reason really want that "difference" phrasing, go ahead.

Quotation marks: Why would you even want to move it? Having the information on the quotation marks and information about "," changing to "." when traded to a Japanese game in the same place would make sense, but as it stands now the article doesn't mention the latter. It can't, either, as I'm not aware of anyone testing it (it's extremely likely it's the case, but we can't say for sure yet). Beyond that connection, having information on the results of a regional difference in the section named "regional differences" makes a whole lot of sense. It's not a bad thing that the paragraph is close to the table. It's good, even, as it's more related to what's around it.

2-dot leader: I went the right way. I put them farther away from each other, whereas the -0.75em in your example puts them even closer. Yours displays as glitchy nonsense on my setup, though, so it's obvious none of these two solutions truly work, huh... How about instead switching the Japanese full-width dot (・) out for a proportional width dot (·)? Even without a <small> tag it looks like this: "··". This should work better across systems.

Please don't say "compromise is great" when you adamantly stick to things like nonexistent words and extremely specific, entirely subjective phrasings of sentences someone else originally wrote. Especially when you've even gone as far as to revert edits that fix misinformation due to being protective of your own phrasing.

LpSamuelm (talk) 12:08, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

"Iterational": If it's your argument, your reasoning, it's very much your job to explain it, not mine to guess at it, especially when I can think of at least one other reasonable argument. In any case, English is a language with rules, and I don't trust dictionaries to cover absolutely every possible permutation of the language. As a relatively simple example (though also very different, sure), Merriam-Webster doesn't have "facebook" (though Oxford does). (In short: dictionaries aren't perfect.) When I did a Google search, I found what appears to be a rather respectable number of uses of "iterational", often in technical papers. Respectfully, I don't think an appeal to authority works when that authority doesn't control the entire English language. This one is the tough issue here... There's no perfect option and alternatives are hard to think of. I've also received a third opinion that "iterational" isn't thoroughly clear, so I suppose I'd be leaning towards settling for "version"...

Great, that works.

Quotation marks: You say that "," changing to "." isn't mentioned anywhere... But that's already implied by "For most text, the game's native character set is used, but if a Pokémon's origin language is Japanese, its nickname and its Original Trainer's name use the Japanese character set. The Japanese games only have the Japanese character set, but with the exception of 0xB8, all inputtable text is identical between international and Japanese character sets." Given your claim then, I suppose I should ask: was that not clear to you? Would it be clearer if we added at the end, "meaning that most text will remain the same"? Back on the immediate subject... I'm relatively baffled by your insistence, but if that's how you feel, then I'll just trim it down where it is to just remove the redundant first line. (Cool?)

2-dot leader: That proportional dot looks great, yeah, thanks!

Otherwise, I'd just like to say, I hope you can understand that I'm trying my best (especially here/now), like I'm sure you are; I'm not trying to do harm or anything. I do respect the work you're doing. All around: thanks!

Tiddlywinks (talk) 15:53, 16 April 2017 (UTC)