Template talk:Subatomic particle

Forced bold?

See discussion at Template Talk:PhysicsParticle. Hqb (talk) 13:31, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

The bar over antiparticles is too high

See this:
t
,
ℓ
. These are the tallest letters on which the bar could be, and still it is almost half an em higher than the top of the symbol. Could it be made closer to the symbol? As the template is now, lowercase letters without ascendents (such as
u
) look very bad. It almost looks like an underline under the corresponding letter of the line above. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  17:29, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. I think the problem ultimately lies in the use of the {{overline}} template, which employs the CSS "text-decoration: overline" style to put an overbar over the particle symbol. Of course, the CSS overline is intended for larger passages of text, not individual characters, so the output doesn't look so great. If one uses instead a Unicode "combining overline" (U+0305, ̅) after the character, the results look a bit nicer: t̅, l̅, u̅, ν̅, K̅. But switching to that might break other uses of {{PhysicsParticle|anti=yes|...}} Hqb (talk) 18:32, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

That's the solution I had in mind, but now I see that, while the vertical position is OK now, the horizontal isn't, bars are displaced to the right — and I'm using Linux. I know that many fonts included in Windows are far worse as far as this issue is concerned. I have thought about using style="border-top: thin solid; padding-top: 0;", but even so the bar is too high (ultK), and, unfortunately, padding cannot be negative. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  18:54, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

why not do it this way ${\bar {t}}{\bar {l}}{\bar {u}}{\bar {\nu }}{\bar {K}}$, or this way ${\overline {t}}{\overline {l}}{\overline {u}}{\overline {\nu }}{\overline {K}}$? Dauto (talk) 21:33, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Please see the discussion about font use over at the Template talk:PhysicsParticle page. There are a number of known issues, all caused by the fact that HTML is not specifically designed to display physics particles and different browser show things differently.

<math> is specifically NOT used because of various reasons: The font family, size and vertical allignment are different from the rest of the text, which looks awful. It gets rendered as an image, which means it cannot be copy-pasted or parsed by accessibility features such as narrator) and text style for links cannot be controlled through css like with normal text (eg, with the monobook skin, links are blue or red and normal text is black).

    — SkyLined (talk) 10:25, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Minus sign

It looks as if the template uses hyphens, rather than minus signs. Compare, for instance,
e⁻
and e⁻ vs.
e⁺
and e⁺.Fcy (talk) 00:29, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

There seems to be number of ways to display a minus in {{SubatomicParticle/symbol}}. It makes sense to standardize this across the template and document this clearly, so future additions also use the same standard. Unfortunately, I haven't the time to do this myself at the moment.     — SkyLined (talk) 12:01, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

It actually does use a minus, not a hyphen. The problem is that it uses the Unicode "superscript minus" (U+207B, '⁻') and "subscript zero" (U+2070, '⁰') symbols, but still an ordinary ASCII "plus sign" (U+002B, '+'), hence the difference in appearance.

It would be possible to switch to "superscript plus" (U+207A, '⁺') as well, for consistency, but there are no superscripted versions of "plus-minus" ('±') or "minus-plus ('∓'), which are also used for a number of particles. Also, since the template itself reduces the size of the superscripts, the pre-superscripted versions of the symbols tend to get vanishingly small in some fonts. So I have reverted this edit for now. Hqb (talk) 17:50, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

• Super-/subscript versions of signs and numbers should NOT be used because the template already makes things super-/subscript. Doing so would result in "super-super"- and "sub-sub"-script.
• Looking at the code, I see both ordinary hyphens ('-', example: chargino-) and proper minus ('&minus;', example: w boson-). We should be using the minus everywhere.

    — SkyLined (talk) 21:57, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Done; apparently it was only the charginos that still used hyphens. Hqb (talk) 07:45, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. It looks much better to me, now. --Fcy (talk) 09:25, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, thanks - I assumed this was going to be a lot of work, but I probably could have done it myself in the time I used to write this reply :) 86.89.144.60 (talk) 21:27, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

The ramshorn upsilon

Looks like this: $\,\Upsilon$. The capital Greek letter Υ (upsilon in the font for Greek letters below) denotes an Upsilon particle. References in several places, however, say that the Greek symbol for the particle should always look like $\,\Upsilon$ (with the curly rams-horn arms) in order to avoid confusion with a Latin Y denoting the hypercharge. This is also the rule in mathematical use of Greek letters, which is why it looks like the above in LaTex, and not at all like a Y. Okay, the problem is that the upsilon used in the template for upsilon meson isn't the straight arm capital upsilon that shows up in the Greek fonts for WP. My browser just renders it as a square: ϒ. Can I take a vote and see for how many others this happens, also? Is it that difficult to put the LaTex ramshorn math upsilon in the template, or is that impossible? SBHarris 00:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

It's doable-ish, but it's ugly as hell and breaks linking features etc... I have no idea why you don't see it displayed correctly, because the ramshorned upsilon comes with the default fonts on Windows or Macs. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:34, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps something to do with the fact that I'm running IE 6, which is now officially outdated. Perhaps in IE 7 it comes out okay. That surprises me, though. And the larger picture is why are we trying to create the Wikipedia for the world in general (nevermind the dusty child in Africa), except they can't read any of the templates or transcluded pages unless they have the latest software. And no, it's not just meson symbols, it's also simple things like transcluded templates for chemical formulas that don't work on old browsers now because somebody figured that the <sup> and <sub> markup wasn't cool enough anymore. And so on. What's the point of having a wikimarkup and wiki symbol set, if we're not going to stick to it? SBHarris 00:53, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Why in the world would you use IE6? It's a 10 year old browser that was outdated even when it came out. It's by far the worse of the worst browsers out there, lacking support for basic HTML and CSS. And there's a very good reason to not use the <sup> and <sub> tags, and that's because you sometimes need to vertically align things (i.e. 123+12
−10 ($123_{-10}^{+12}$) vs. 123⁺¹²₋₁₀). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 01:05, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Apparently, your problem is that IE does not "override the display font where glyphs don't exist in that font". IE never cease to astonish me... Apparently there are workarounds, so I'll investigate. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 01:17, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Alright, could you refresh this page and tell me if
ϒ
displays correctly now? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 01:25, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

No, thanks for trying, though. I rebooted, hit the "refresh" tab under options, and went so far as to clear out all my .tmp files before relogging on WP. No change. I seem to remember that there's some way of forcing a refresh on WP that isn't one of these, but I can't remember quite what it is (disconcertingly it once kept me from reading a change made to an infobox template correction in the article, until I'd done something else....) Anyway, no luck. I can't read 123+12
−10 either, for that matter. All I see is the lower subscript number in the first one (the other is totally missing, a problem I've had before with templated chemical ions where there's a chance to do this). In LaTeX only I see what it's supposed to look like, with one number over another. BTW, the reason for the old version of IE is the integration of OUTLOOK later, and a huge number of outlook letters that are very hard to archive once they've gone into a later versio of IE. A familiar problem for Windoze users who never thought they'd ever have 10 years of letters. SBHarris 03:17, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

If you really have been using IE6 to browse the web for the last 10 years, your machine is part of a botnet by now. It is my experience that if you invest the time, you can find out how to convert your documents to a newer format and update your software. Even if this was indeed completely impossible, you should still install another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera besides IE6 and keep your use of IE6 to the absolute minimum. As it is, your are making it ridiculously easy for computer criminals to compromise your machine and use it to stage further attacks on you and others. I find it impossible to feel any pity for those who put others at risk because they fail to invest time to keep their software up-to-date.

Showing information correctly using LaTeX is impossible because the font size, family and baseline differ from the rest of the text and you cannot show links correctly. Furthermore, you cannot copy+paste it as text and it doesn't work with accessibility features for the handicapped at all AFAIK. HTML/Unicode is a better option in these respects, but as you point out it doesn't always work in IE6. So, compromises will have to be made and I prefer limited IE6 support, but we should probably scale this discussion up and/or vote to get consensus on this from everybody.

That said, ϒ looks nothing like the Unicode standard in any browser on Windows 7 either, so there is obviously something wrong with the font on Windows that cannot be fixed using HTML/Unicode. We may have to compromise and use LaTeX for Ramshorn Upsilon: I'd rather have a bad layout with correct information than a correct layout with bad information.

    — SkyLined (talk) 14:24, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

But it does look like the ramshorned upsilon. Although perhaps the extent that it looks exactly like $\Upsilon$ is font-dependent. I checked it with default fonts and superior fonts and there's no confusing it (
ϒ
) with a wye (Y) or the regular upsilon (Υ). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:26, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Headbomb: unfortunately you seem to have a non-standard setup because they all look the same for me on all my machines, here's a screen shot:

    — SkyLined (talk) 08:45, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I see a ramshorned upsilon. Not the prettiest one, but it's obviously not a wye (
ϒ
vs. Y). Zoom in on them and it'll be quite obvious. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:56, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and as a general recommendation, if you have DejaVu Sans, use that one. If you don't have it, I think you can set it up through your user preferences. See User:Headbomb for general recommendations on the use of fonts. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:58, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

It's simply not practical to expect everybody that uses Wikipedia to either zoom in to be able to see the one or two pixels that differentiates these characters or install a different font. As I understand it, the whole point of this discussion is that Wikipedia should show information in such a way that it is not hard to read correctly for as many people as possible. Unfortunately, that is not the case here.     — SkyLined (talk) 20:29, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, but that's a font issue. It's up to people to get good fonts to read stuff like they want. This is hardly unique to the ramshorned upsilon/upsilon/wye situation (
ϒ
/Υ/Y). For example, ν υ and v looks alike too on most fonts, and so do β and B on several others, and plenty of others as well. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:40, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree that we cannot be expected to check that things look good for every possible font setting. We should try to make Wikipedia look correct in as many settings as possible, and I'm willing to debate where we draw the line. But you cannot honestly suggest all Windows users should change their font settings to read Wikipedia. That is never going to happen, so we will have to work around these issues.     — SkyLined (talk) 09:28, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Weird formatting bug

Look at the "Discovered" row in the infobox at Neutrino: on my browser at least, the links on that line are all subscripted. Any idea of what's going on there? ― A. di M.​  02:30, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that every table element (td, th) has TOP alignment. Text is normally put directly into this element. Links get their own element, which itself has BOTTOM alignment. This is not a problem in {{val}} but a problem in {{Infobox particle}} or, more likely,{{Infobox}} itself. I don't know how to fix this off the top of my head, so I suggest you start a discussion there.     — SkyLined (talk) 09:21, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Yeah. I've reverted to an old version of {Infobox particle} who doesn't use {Infobox} and it works fine. ― A. di M.​  11:33, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

And I've reverted back to the version which does use it, and now it works. Either they've fixed Template:Infobox or this is one of the bugs introduced by the software update. ― A. di M.​  11:38, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it still looks wrong to me, even after purging the page. I doubt this is a server problem; there is no need for a server bug to explain this and it should be easy to fix by wrapping all text in each cell in an infobox in an element with bottom vertical-alignment: all text will be top aligned w/ regard to the cell, but bottom aligned w/ regard to the individual sections of the text (eg. text vs link). I'll start a discussion at {{infobox}} about this.     — SkyLined (talk) 14:56, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

⇒ Template talk:Infobox#vertical alignment     — SkyLined (talk) 15:09, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

New version

As this template was mentioned on Bugzilla as causing load problems I have modified it to avoid the massive switch statements. The current version does, however, use "ifexists" as a form of defensive programming (one per invocation). If this becomes a problem, and confidence in usage is high, the "ifexists" can be removed, without breaking anything that is not broken anyway. Rich Farmbrough, 18:13, 31 December 2011 (UTC).

Upsilon displays as question mark

On Windows 7 using Firefox 9.0.1, Chrome 17 beta and IE 9, the upsilon
ϒ
displays for me as a question mark, whether I'm logged in or not. Is there some special font to install? AxelBoldt (talk) 00:27, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I just edited Template:Subatomic particle/symbol/upsilon and exchanged the question mark I found there with a GREEK UPSILON WITH HOOK SYMBOL (U+03D2). This fixes it for me; I hope I didn't break it for anybody else. AxelBoldt (talk) 03:22, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I think it may have been messed up during Rich Farmbrough's recent edits... I've checked to see if any other symbols were imilarly affected, but found none.

However: I did find that the upsilon with a link still displays a question mark (see Template:SubatomicParticle/list/mesons). I'm not sure why this is; it should use the exact same template to get the symbol. I've tried purging all the templates to fix it to no avail. I've not familiarized myself with the new way the template works after Rich's edits and I'm at a loss as to what's causing this issue.     — SkyLined (talk) 14:42, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

There was another question mark in Template:Subatomic particle/link/upsilon; I fixed it. AxelBoldt (talk) 21:10, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Neutralinos / Charginos notation

Are the notations used for charginos C͂^±
₁ and neutralinos N͂⁰
₁ common? I'm a physicist working in the field of supersymmetry, and I've seen them today for the first time (on the page Neutralino). Maybe we should change the default to the conventional ${\tilde {\chi }}_{i}^{\pm },{\tilde {\chi }}_{i}^{0}$, and list the other notation as an alternative?

On a related note, in my browser (Chrome on Linux), I can barely see the tilde on C and N. It blends into the letter. C͂^±
_i vs. ${\tilde {C}}_{i}^{\pm }$. I'm not sure how to fix this though. JDNacho (talk) 08:16, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Antisuperpartner

I suggest e.g. for Template:Subatomic_particle/symbol/antisquark the use of {{Physics particle|anti=yes|q&#x0342;}} (
q͂
) instead of {{Physics particle|q&amp#x0305;&#x0342;}} (
q̅͂
).--Petermahlzahn (talk) 23:56, 23 June 2014 (UTC)