Our set of tags

Question

After a few questions about tags, meta-tags, what is valid and what should not, I thought it would be useful to keep all of this information in one place. Eventually this will be also useful to populate our FAQ.

It's a CW so everybody is free to edit. Let's keep the general guidelines in the question, and discuss about issues with specific tags on individual answers.

Recommended Tags

The following kinds of tags are recommended:

• Formats, compilers, and tools e.g.: luatex, pdftex, bibtex, context, ... (but not latex, see below)
• Package and class names, e.g.: tikz-pgf, hyperref, amsmath, ...
• Command and environment names, e.g.: itemize, hbox, ...
• Specific topics, e.g.: macros, fonts, graphics, errors, floats, ... (Note: prefer plural nouns)
• Specific actions, e.g.: installing, compiling, debugging, citing, ... (Note: prefer -ing verb form)

The following math related tags are recommended:

• Use math-mode for questions about typesetting the content of math formulas.
• Use equations for questions about how to include equations in a document (e.g. the equation, gather, align, etc. environments)
• Use symbols for queries about how to produce specific symbols. But only if the comprehensive list or the detexify online tool can't answer your question.

Questions such as What is the best book to start learning LaTeX?, where many good answers are expected and none will be the right answer, should take the big-list tag, and should normally be marked Community Wiki.

Discouraged tags

• Meta-tags, i.e. tags about the kind of question or the person asking the question, but not about the content or topic of the question.

  Examples: subjective, beginners, best-practices.

  A special exception is made for the big-list tag, which is a meta-tag.

• The latex or latex2e tags. Questions are, by default, assumed to be about the LaTeX language/system. Unless your question is specifically about another format (e.g. context) or specifically about a TeX compiler (e.g. pdftex), you don't need to specify you're using LaTeX.

• The tex tag. If your question is specifically about TeX primitives or the TeX system (as opposed to LaTeX), use tex-core instead. If your question is about using low-level TeX commands to define a macro then use the macros tag.

Answer 1

What should we do about the [latex] tag?

There was an earlier discussion, but I really think there was no consensus. Moreover, now that the site has been running for a few days we can see how these tags have been used so far.

As of now, the [latex] tag is completely useless. The large majority of questions in the site are about LaTeX anyway, but only a few of them are tagged so. Even worst some questions are only tagged [latex] which is, in my view, completely useless. So I would also suggest in this case to discourage using the [latex] tag, since it is the "default" topic, unless another ([plain-tex], [luatex], [context], etc.) is specified.

Thoughts?

Answer 2

Discourage the use of the [tex] tag, use [tex-core] instead.

My suggestion:

since “Plain TeX” seems to denote something else than TeX, let’s have the following tag alias:

tex => tex-core

This should be easy enough to find. I would very much like to set up the synonym while the tex tag is still only scarcely used. Once it’s used more often, setting up the synonym will be impossible, since the tex tag will appear more often than tex-core (and the Stack Exchange app then prevents setting up the synonym).

I’ve introduced the synonym. Please vote for it so that questions will be retagged automatically!

Answer 3

"Concept" vs "command" tags?

According to your list for packages/commands that are named after concepts, we should have two tags: The command name (usually singular) and the concept name (in plural form). E.g. we have the [matrix] tag (for the environment), but questions about matrices (with various commands) should be tagged [matrices]. What should we do about those tags?

Answer 4

[compiling], [compile] or [compilation] (and similar tags)

By the suggestion in the original post here, we should have [installing], [compiling], [debugging], etc. There are currently the following suggestion of tags synonyms open:

• [compiling] -> [compilation]
• [installation] -> [install]
• [print] -> [printing]

I don't really mind which form we take, but we should at least try to be consistent.

Answer 5

What about math related tags?

Another question: What is the tag for math mode. E.g. if someone asks about a symbol for use in an equation, there are currently several possible tags to choose from: [math], [mathmode], [equations] and of course no tag i.e. only [symbol] (which btw should be plural?).

Answer 6

I'd like to suggest "compilation" as a synonym of "compiling", but this doesn't seem to be possible, as "compilation" is more common than "compiling". Now what?

Another example: "template" as a synonym of "templates".

Answer 7

Should hyphenation be encouraged or discouraged?

In the suggested tag synonyms there is [math-mode] -> [mathmode] but [tableofcontents] -> [table-of-contents]. This feels rather inconsistent, especially considering that the command is named \tableofcontents.

Answer 8

AMS tags

I'm not sure about the 'ams -> amsmath' suggestion. The AMS has more packages than just 'amsmath', in particular they have their 'amsref' stuff. I would regard the 'ams' tag as ambiguous, and so not as one that is synonymous with another tag. Rather, whenever 'ams' rears its ugly head, it should be retagged to an appropriate tag.

To expand on that, synonymous tags should really be synonymous. I think that the most obvious examples being singular to plural, or no-hyphens to hyphens. Where a tag is ambiguous or just plain useless, the questions should be retagged and the tag effectively dropped.

Answer 9

Now that we have moderators, could someone also rename [error] -> [errors] and leave [error] as a synonym?

Answer 10

I think I may have invented the [best-practices] tag for Best practices references. Note than in this particular case, [best-practices] was not a meta-tag, since best practices were precisely the topic of the question.

Answer 11

Tagging header-footer versus separate header and footer tags?

I see that several questions are tagged header-footer. To me, these feel like two separate tags, although I can also see that they often go together. Is the general feeling that we should always pick header-footer (i.e. discourage header and footer separately)?

Answer 12

Could someone with enough rights please remove the beginners tag from https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/604/ive-just-been-told-i-have-to-write-a-minimal-example-what-is-that-closed