Re: 9.5 release notes

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 11:21:35AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> > OK, new idea. What about, instead of having the last name be all-caps,
> > we have the last name start with an uppercase letter, then use smallcaps
> > for the rest of the last name:
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps
> > That way, the last name will not appear too large, but will be clear as
> > something different from other names. Peter, I assume small-caps is
> > possible.
>
> FWIW, I vote strongly against having any contributor names in caps in the
> release notes. It would be visually distracting, and it would make the
> name look like the most important thing in the entry, while in point of
> fact it's the *least* important. (Maybe not to the contributor, but
> certainly to anybody else.)

Yes, we are already trying to deemphasize contributor names, so
capitalizing them is certainly moving in the wrong direction.

> For pretty much the same reason, I'm not in favor of small caps either.
> Even assuming we can do that consistently (which I bet we can't; we
> do not have all that much control over how web browsers render HTML),
> it would be calling attention to itself, which is exactly not the result
> I think we should be after.

I am sure almost every browser can render smallcaps, even if it doesn't
have a smallcaps-specific font installed --- same for PDF. We couldn't
do that for a text file, but I don't think we ship a text HISTORY file
anymore.

I didn't think smallcaps would be any more visible than standard
lower-case text. In fact, smallcaps is designed to fit the font size of
lowercase letters. I would run a text but it doesn't seem we have any
references to smallcaps in our SGML files. This could get tricky
because, as I remember, the rendering control is in the web style
sheets, and you would need to have all rendering do the same thing.

Any new ideas on how we can signify family names first? It seems
culturally-insensitive to always put the family name last if people
don't want that, but it also seems odd to have a mix of ordering in the
same document. Certainly others must have had the same issue.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ Everyone has their own god. +