User talk:Fly by Night/Archive_Apr_10
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I made some style changes to your article harmonic differential, and I had some comments that may make article editing easier for you in the future. You may not know about the templates {{nowrap}}, {{nowrap begin}}, and {{nowrap end}}, but they make non-breaking spaces much easier to read. Usually we don't use periods for multiplication; instead we use nothing or we use ·. The HTML entity  
inserts a small space which is very useful for spacing differentials. We don't usually italicize Greek letters: ω, not ω. You can find all of this at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics).
Finally, I noticed that you prefer to write differentials with a roman d (as in dx, not dx). Where did you learn this? I've only ever seen this done on Wikipedia, and I'm curious to know where it comes from. Ozob (talk) 04:11, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for the improvements to the article, and thanks for the template tips. I'll make sure to use them soon. As for the Roman and italic d, it's just a matter of style. Some people write dx because the think of d as an operator, and the operator is applied to x. Others write dx because they treat dx like a variable in some sense, and ignore the idea of d as an operator. The Royal Society Proceedings Series A (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) have a style file (rspublic.cls) to be used in all of its published articles that specifically defines a macro to use for the differential which uses a Roman d: \newcommand{\rd}{\mathrm{d}} %Roman d for differential. •• Fly by Night (talk) 18:39, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Ah! Hmm. On the other hand, they also suggest a Roman i for the imaginary unit and a Roman e for the base of the natural logarithm. I'm not aware of anyone using either of those. The relevant style guideline here is probably WP:RETAIN, which tells me that I can't edit an article specifically to change dx to dx, nor can you edit it to go the other way; the style may be changed only for consistency's sake. (I should mention that I usually think of d as an operator, the exterior derivative, but I still prefer it in italics: Most single letter operators are written in italic, as in f, g, T, and so on.)
- But you weren't aware of anyone (outside of Wikipedia) using a Roman d for differential, so there's no reason to assume that you would be aware of any other notational conventions. •• Fly by Night (talk) 18:55, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- I prefer raised asterisks because they're semantically correct and because in the right font an unraised asterisk will give an expression that does not make sense, such as . But of course they compromise the beauty of the expression. I don't think there's an established rule for this one, but I'll defer to you for this article since you're its first major contributor. Ozob (talk) 04:39, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- If I were to have used LaTeX coding, i.e. <math></math> then I would have used the command \omega^*, but I didn't, I used HTML, so I used ω*, instead of the ω<sup>*</sup> (ω*) which you prefer. I don't know why you decided to arrive on my talk page and start nit picking; but I'd prefer that you left me in peace to edit. Article talk pages are the place for this kind of talk. Thank you. •• Fly by Night (talk) 18:55, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Ah! Hmm. On the other hand, they also suggest a Roman i for the imaginary unit and a Roman e for the base of the natural logarithm. I'm not aware of anyone using either of those. The relevant style guideline here is probably WP:RETAIN, which tells me that I can't edit an article specifically to change dx to dx, nor can you edit it to go the other way; the style may be changed only for consistency's sake. (I should mention that I usually think of d as an operator, the exterior derivative, but I still prefer it in italics: Most single letter operators are written in italic, as in f, g, T, and so on.)
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- PLEASE DO NOT MODIFY IT IN ANY WAY.