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At the moment, there are four tags that deal with encoding issues: the general (95 questions), the more specific (57 questions), and the two package-specific tags (66 questions) and (64 questions). The assignment of tags to specific questions seems to be at least partially a matter of chance: questions will usually be about either font or input encoding, and questions will sometimes specifically deal with the fontenc package.

I suggest that two tags are enough. Let's make a synonym of . Let's create a new tag and make the existing tag a synonym of it. The questions tagged with should be manually retagged to either or ; some questions will feature both of these tags.

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  • Fully agree. And well done for spotting the issue!
    – Xavier
    Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 21:47

2 Answers 2

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As my proposal has so far gained a score of +9, I've changed/added the tag wiki excerpts for and the new :

{input-encodings} is about the various input code pages like latin1 or utf-8 ({unicode}) which interprete the sequence of numbers underlying text files and map each number to a certain glyph (character). A popular package for pdfLaTeX is inputenc.

{font-encodings} is about the various font or output code pages like T1 (for Latin) or T2*x* (for Cyrillic) which tell the compiler where to find a particular glyph (character) in a font file, hereby supporting correct hyphenation of words. A popular package for pdfLaTeX is fontenc.

I ask a moderator to

Questions tagged with will be manually retagged in the following weeks.

EDIT: Retagging has been completed; right now, there are 135 and 109 questions (with 14 questions featuring both tags).

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  • I support your approach, but what about new users, who don't know the difference between font-encodings and input-encodings? I see mistagged posts coming.
    – Henri Menke
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 13:52
  • @HenriMenke Sometimes this can't be avoided. At least it shouldn't get as bad as right now with the align tag which is often used by mistake (i.e., other than for the align environment) instead of the correct horizontal-alignment.
    – lockstep
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 14:06
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I agree with you. It isn't meaningful to mix input encoding and font encoding.

However I fear that the tag may reappear. So I think it would be good to keep for only those 3 questions which actually deal with both (difference between them, loading order). In addition it should be made clear in the tag wiki, that either input or font encoding should be chosen for a specific issue.

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  • Regarding your concern: We also didn't keep the figures tag just because we feared it might reappear.
    – lockstep
    Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 7:43
  • @lockstep Actually we kept {figures}, as a synonym, so it cannot reappear as a normal tag. However, {encoding} would not fit as a synonym, that's why I made this suggestion.
    – Stefan Kottwitz Mod
    Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 7:51
  • True. A better example: We killed the layout tag; see meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1300/…
    – lockstep
    Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 8:12
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    I understand the fear, but I don't believe it should prevent us from removing a bad tag (assuming it's deemed bad). If it reappears, we'll reremove it :)
    – Xavier
    Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 21:46
  • encoding could be a reasonable tag for a question dealing with string manipulation in Luatex.
    – Charles Stewart
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 11:36

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