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Taking a quick look at the posts tagged "overlay" then I can see two obvious distinct meanings:

  1. Beamer's overlay mechanism
  2. Overlaying some text on top of other text, usually one symbol on top of another.

My feeling is that these are truly distinct and should therefore be separated. Since "overlay" is always going to be ambiguous, we should have proper forms that are not ambiguous and then make "overlay" a synonym for the most used (or perhaps the most used by new(ish) users, if that's possible to work out ... where's Paulo's expertise with the data explorer when you need it?).

So ... how about: beamer-overlays and symbol-overlays (not sure what our style is on plural/singular for the main tag). We could also have the more generic text-overlay (though I doubt that would come up so much).

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    overlay is also a term used with tikzpicture. Two other words that could be used for overlay in sense 2 could be superposition and overprinting (though there is also an overprint environment in beamer). – mas Nov 21 '11 at 11:47
  • @mas: Good point about TikZ. I'd forgotten that. – Andrew Stacey Nov 21 '11 at 11:54
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A tag may have different meanings. Since questions allow several tags, a second tag would make clear what's meant. Let's look for example at the tag:

I find 85 questions tagged with , so I better narrow my search adding my graphic tool:

Similarly, instead of creating new tags , , etc. I suggest working with combinations of existing tags , , and with the tag. I don't see a problem. I also can hardly imagine questions tagged + and + - looks redundant to me, however I would not omit that class/package tag, otherwise I might not see the questions in a broad tag search.

Good question though, I also wondered earlier about the ambiguity of overlays.

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  • Would it be possible to have e.g. a message "You tagged as >>overlay<<. This is ambiguous. Please a another tag for clarity."? Or have this text (or similar) added to the overlay-tag-description? – Stephen Nov 21 '11 at 19:19
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    @Stephen Not the message - however the tag description would be easy. Further, people seeing a missing tag often add it. – Stefan Kottwitz♦ Nov 21 '11 at 20:57

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