{character} is a synonym of {symbols}, but {characters} isn't

Question

Is there a reason for this? I've occasionally used characters because it seemed more appropriate than symbols, e.g. I'm having a hard time regarding using hobby MF font with LaTeX, adding accented characters as being about "symbols". One way or the other, we should use the tags consciously; seeing that character is a synonym of symbols already, characters should probably be a synonym as well because there's no relevant semantic difference between singular and plural.

Edit:
Having learned more about how our tagging system works, character should proabably be gotten rid of, if characters is made a synonym of symbols.

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Edit2:

Alright, now both tags have tag wikis that emphasize the difference between them, and we're kind of using them accordingly:

{symbols} is about specific non-alphabetic symbols or math symbols, e.g., about looking-up, constructing, or using symbols. For questions about {fonts} or alphabetic {characters} use the respective tag instead.

{characters} is about the regular alphabetic characters that are part of some script in a language. For accented characters, add {accents}. For non-alphabetic characters, use {symbols} instead.

As long as we're not doing any merging (and I'm actually not sure that would be the best idea), I'd say let's fix the weird synonyms for starters!

Answer 1

Indeed, character and symbol have different meanings.

• Character stands for an abstract symbol, for the meaning of it, independent of the graphical representation.

• Symbol means a glyph, the graphical representation.

In TeX and LaTeX, we have input and output, let's have a look.

• Input means characters. For example we have questions regarding encoding. I guess not specifically about characters, since typing on keyboard is not a TeX topic and also how to get non-keyboard characters is more concerning the operating system.

• Output means characters and symbols. There are more questions are about symbols than characters. For example, people rarely speak about a bullet character which could be represented by a filled circle or an empty one, or smaller like a dot. We speak about what should appear there.

Theoretically, we can cleanly separate characters if the actual glyph doesn't matter. But does it help the user, who comes here because of a character or symbol problem, does he differentiate? Does he know that he must type "character" for looking how to work with a backslash or a tilde (independent of the font), but not type "symbol"?

I think in practice it's ok to keep one tag for both. In consequence, we should make characters a synonym as well. I'll let that open for now, perhaps somebody would check and tell us, how many questions are really purely about characters.

Answer 2

Based on observation, I don't think that the typical user of tex.sx is likely to differentiate correctly between characters and symbols. The problem is the same as in my former suggestion Split the {bibtex} tag into {bibtex-format} and {bibtex-program} -- the distinction is (somewhat) meaningful in theory, but confusing in practice. I'd say it's about time to make characters a synonym of symbols.

Answer 3

the names "symbol" and "character" mean quite different things to me, although i agree that they might not to a novice. how about these "enhanced" names to distinguish:

• character-symbol
• character-internal

"character-code" means something else entirely, so isn't appropriate.