Timeline for PSA: Please don't post images of text
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
33 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 19 at 9:27 | comment | added | Kamil Maciorowski | Another reason: for some users images just don't work nowadays. | |
| May 2 at 18:38 | answer | added | J-Cake | timeline score: -1 | |
| Jan 7, 2021 at 19:45 | comment | added | terdon Mod | @estrando please take the time to actually read the post before commenting. Of course you won't copy it out if you don't have a choice. That would be what the last paragraph is about. However, many people will come here and post screenshots of their text editor to show us a script, for example. That's what we're trying to avoid. Nobody is suggesting you should transcribe it by hand when you cannot copy. Unless it's just a few lines in which case, please do so. | |
| Jan 7, 2021 at 19:19 | comment | added | bluesquare | XD I'm not going to type out error text if I can't copy it out of the window. | |
| Jul 20, 2019 at 17:41 | comment | added | Rusi | @terdon About migration: I've seen mods on the music SE site protest about images. Photography is probably quite an exception | |
| Jul 1, 2019 at 15:09 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | It is of course possible to create animated images from which text can be copied ;-). | |
| Jun 29, 2019 at 10:49 | history | rollback | terdonMod |
Rollback to Revision 6
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| Jun 29, 2019 at 10:45 | history | edited | ctrl-alt-delor | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
fix some punctuation
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:37 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://unix.stackexchange.com/ with https://unix.stackexchange.com/
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| Jul 19, 2016 at 22:09 | comment | added | Damian Yerrick | Is there a canonical "How to copy an error message from an X11 application" question? | |
| Jul 17, 2016 at 12:39 | history | edited | Stéphane Chazelas |
edited tags
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| Jul 17, 2016 at 8:44 | comment | added | EKons | Let's leave the comment section alone. | |
| Jul 17, 2016 at 8:37 | comment | added | EKons | @Braiam What if you want to copy the prompt itself? | |
| Jul 16, 2016 at 23:03 | comment | added | Braiam |
@ΈρικΚωνσταντόπουλος redirection do wonders one those cases, ie. thing that fails &> log
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| Jul 16, 2016 at 15:13 | comment | added | terdon Mod | @ΈρικΚωνσταντόπουλος yes, that's why I specified modern terminals. | |
| Jul 16, 2016 at 13:26 | comment | added | EKons |
@terdon xterm doesn't support copy or paste; it just has middle-click copy&paste (both at the same time.)
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| Jul 16, 2016 at 11:21 | comment | added | terdon Mod | @JonasWielicki well, while terminals might not allow Ctrl+C, most if not all modern terminals have the classic Edit->copy paste and, of course, select and middle click paste. I have never once seen compiler output from an IDE here. That might be common on SO, I guess, but not here. | |
| Jul 16, 2016 at 11:17 | comment | added | Jonas Schäfer | To be fair, it is not always "easier" to copy&paste the text; if it was, people would do it. The image questions I see are either terminals or compiler output in an IDE. The latter often requires some special shortcut or menu interaction to copy. The former is also unintuitive to many, many people I’ve worked with. Terminals won’t allow you to copy with Ctrl+C for reasons obvious to advanced users, but novices may be confused by that and assume they cannot copy. | |
| Jul 14, 2016 at 18:25 | comment | added | Monty Harder | I'd add a point to the above list: The image is of no help to someone who wants to use a service like Google Translate to render the page in another language. | |
| Jul 11, 2016 at 3:00 | comment | added | cas | @G-Man the only reason the paragraphs are non-consecutive is that I changed "In addition..." from a sentence into a separate paragraph. I'd have moved it above "While there are sometimes valid...", but it makes the most sense immediately after "in most cases it is not useful". As for tone, it doesn't feel dismissive to me, and it's not meant to be. It's describing what should be the default - don't post images, but here's a non-exclusive list of some valid exceptions. | |
| Jul 10, 2016 at 18:42 | comment | added | terdon Mod | As for 1) perhaps, but all I really wanted here is a local meta posts I can point to when people post screenshots of their terminals. 2) I really don't see. but feel free to edit. | |
| Jul 10, 2016 at 18:40 | comment | added | G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica' | Well, (1) I agree with Toby that this is not specific to U&L or even the technical/coding sites in general, but is relevant to the entire SE network, and (2) it just seems to me that your two non-sequential paragraphs have a dismissive tone, as if you're making an obligatory reference to the weird uncle that nobody wants to talk about — sort of "don't ever post images of text (mumble mumble mumble)". I was suggesting that your advisory's tone could be more balanced, as in "don't post images of text except in the following cases…." | |
| Jul 10, 2016 at 17:24 | comment | added | terdon Mod | @G-Man you mean putting it in caps as well as bold? There are already two paragraphs there stating that it's fine in certain cases. The visual appearance of text bit is in bold and the last paragraph also gives other examples. I'm not trying to say it's never good, I'm trying to stop people from posting screenshots of their terminals or shell scripts. | |
| Jul 10, 2016 at 17:17 | comment | added | G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica' | I agree with Toby. Perhaps your PSA needs to be amended to be less dismissive of the common-sense special cases, such as (1) if the visual appearance of the text is essential to the content of the post, and (2) if technical difficulties prevent the poster from doing copy and paste. (Another example of this would be a user who had a virtual machine, but he was having a problem getting networking up on the VM, so he could access it only through the console.) Even on the photography site, I cannot think of any reason to post an image of text when the only information to be conveyed is the text. | |
| Jul 10, 2016 at 7:37 | history | edited | cas | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
updated valid reasons
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| Jul 9, 2016 at 23:32 | answer | added | TomRoche | timeline score: 12 | |
| Jul 9, 2016 at 22:47 | history | edited | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' |
edited tags
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| Jul 8, 2016 at 12:38 | answer | added | Toby Speight | timeline score: 30 | |
| Jul 8, 2016 at 12:28 | comment | added | terdon Mod | @TobySpeight migrated, no. I don't think so. This is certainly a good idea on the technical/coding sites but not, for example, in photography. | |
| Jul 8, 2016 at 12:27 | comment | added | Toby Speight | This is a problem on many stack exchange sites - should this question be migrated to meta.SE? The nearest I found there is How valuable are images containing text, compared with markdown? | |
| Jul 7, 2016 at 23:05 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackUnix/status/751190464460652544 | ||
| Jul 7, 2016 at 17:15 | history | edited | cas | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added image dpi issues, image Q.s being ignored, and more about copy/paste.
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| Jul 7, 2016 at 15:01 | history | asked | terdonMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |