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Funnily they refer to some people wrongly using "Gnuplot" instead of "gnuplot" yet they use "Gnuplot" 23 times in this FAQ.
by savant2 5y ago
Funnily they refer to some people wrongly using "Gnuplot" instead of "gnuplot" yet they use "Gnuplot" 23 times in this FAQ.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wartijn_ 5y agoBut only because it's the fist word of a sentence all those times.
- bravura 5y ago“ 1.1 What is gnuplot ? gnuplot is a command-driven plotting program. It can be used interactively to plot functions and data points in both two- and three-dimensional plots in many different styles and many different output formats. Gnuplot can also be used as a scripting language to automate generation of plots. It is designed primarily for the visual display of scientific data. gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable; you don’t have to pay for it. You are welcome to download the source code.” If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> “ 1.1 What is gnuplot ? > If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere. If you read closely, you’ll notice that only “x” level headings use title case, “x.y” level headings use sentence case; there is no clear instance of “gnuplot”, capitalized or not, in title case anywhere in the document. The only arguable case is the page header “gnuplot FAQ”, but since it is sui generis there is no way other than inferring from capitalization in the rest of the document of telling whether its titlecase or just the preferred labelling of the product followed by “FAQ” (and the context suggests the latter).
- ezequiel-garzon 5y agoDid you read this part? You see people use "Gnuplot" quite a bit because many of us have an aversion to starting a sentence with a lower case letter, even in the case of proper nouns and titles. gnuplot is not […] Most of us don’t care about forcing the first letter to be always lowercase, and in fact feel it’s a lost cause. But I agree that after such an explicit clarification I would expect to see “gnuplot” everywhere in the official documentation, except for this particular excerpt and when they refer to “GNUplot”. Otherwise it is clearly inconsistent with what they are explaining.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Did you read this part? Yes, I also read the body text after the numbered heading in the prior excerpt, which makes two different choices in sentence-starting position in sentence case. But what I was responding to was the inference of a rule bases on usage in “title font” (which seems to be a reference to title case), not a complaint about the inconsistent use in sentence case. Hence, the except you provide here isn't really germane to anything I've said.
- bonoboTP 5y agoThey very correctly mix it to show that it does not matter. Better make some plots then bikeshed this to death.
- bravura 5y agoIf you look at the quotation, they mix capitalization in the body text.
- kergonath 5y ago> If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere. The section titles are in sentence case, not title case. You would not expect it to be capitalised unless it were the first word of the title. The inconsistency in that paragraph is in the first sentence.
- proto-n 5y agoTo be fair, they mostly advise against GNUplot, and mention Gnuplot because of the aversion to start sentences with lowercase (which is also where they use it with uppercase).
- iso1210 5y agoDoesn't explain 8.4 Why does gnuplot ignore my very small numbers? For some purposes Gnuplot treats numbers less than 1e-08 as being zero....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- swiley 5y agoI always refer to the GNU one as "GNUPlotutils."
- andix 5y agoBecause it's the correct way to spell it. Names are spelled with an uppercase letter in the beginning and all the other letters are lowercase. "I saw John" vs. "I saw john" vs. "I saw JOHN". First one is correct. Even if John tells you "My name is spelled with a lower case j". Or if John writes: "this orange thing is a kaRROT", it's still a carrot. You can write whatever you want. You can also write "Tis is me bunni and he likes KArRoTs" and have a lot of friends agree with you that's the correct spelling. And it is still generally considered wrong :)
- usrusr 5y agoAnd even in cases where the lowercase starting letter is somewhat accepted, the start of the sentence rule is still left untouched by most writers. Iphones come to mind.
- NullPrefix 5y agoHow do you spell iPhone when starting a sentence? >Iphone is a phone made by Apple
- toxik 5y agoIn my native language, the general advice from our language council is to NOT listen to corporation’s rules. You would write “an iphone”, and casing as usual. In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone. The idea is that the name casing rules are for showing respect, and an inanimate product does not deserve the same respect as a person. OTOH you would say Apple though, but I guess that avoids some obvious ambiguity
- layer8 5y agoThey don’t say “Gnuplot” is wrong. They even include themselves (“many of us”) in those people that don’t want to start sentences and title words with lower case. My reading of that paragraph is that while “GNUplot” is definitely incorrect, “Gnuplot” may naturally occur due to capitalization, just like with any lower-case noun.