Template talk:Inscription/label

Use of labels for inscriptions

Gauguin - Femme a la mere

Hello there,
I've found multiple insciptions on a paintings file-page (image right).
Looks as if the texts are thought to be single statements, each one about one inscription or textline somehow placed in the artwork. And they can be used in dotted listings:

• Title bottom left:

Vahine no te Miti

• Signature and date bottom right:

P. Gauguin / 92

So my question is: Should'nt they all been handled as titles and thus always starting with a capitalized word in all languages?

Atually most German text is beginning in Capitals, and sometimes English text does the same; most other language-text is beginning in lower chars ... but not always ...
I think, it could look better if one uiform notation would be used. ;-)
Jaybear (talk) 12:42, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm in favour of this, but I have no idea how to do it. DutchHoratius (talk) 12:54, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Some people like to use dots at the beginning of each line, some people dont (I do not have any strong opinion on that, but clearly each line is logically separable from the next).

If I understand correctly you suggest that each line should begin with a capital letter ? For all I can see the current template always uses lower case (except for German nouns that are always capitalized) but I have nothing against switching to a first letter in upper case. In most cases it would look better. I can do it if there is support for it (it should be done at {{Inscription}} not here, so that "date and seal" becomes "Date and seal" rather than "Date and Seal"). But it would stop working as soon as we add Wikipedia links, so it would not be perfectly clean. --Zolo (talk) 13:58, 3 May 2012 (UTC) (typos fixed later)

Ok, another interesting point of view ;)

With little more searching I found an already existing "template" {{ucfirst:}}, which is just doing this job:

Without:

• Signature and date bottom right:

P. Gauguin / 92

With use of {{ucfirst:}}:

• Signature and date bottom right:

P. Gauguin / 92

Remaining question is: where to use this {{ucfirst:}}?

• In the template {{Inscription}}
• Template {{Inscription}}, but only when ordered by a new additional switch, may be "firstupperchar" ("0" as default = not upperchar, "1" = use upperchar)
• The end-user/editor has to use it as in my upper example

Jaybear (talk) 12:44, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

This {{ucfirst:}} thingy looks good, but I think many people don't know of it's existence. Is it possible to program it directly into the inscription template? DutchHoratius (talk) 13:58, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Ok done. Yes it is simpler to add the ucfirst directly to the template than in individual files. I did not add an option "upperchar = 1": it would require to duplicate a good part of the template and I do not think it is worth it (you can still switch back to lower case by wrapping the whole thing in a "lcfirst", but it would not be a very good idea as it would also lower-case words that should take an upper case like "Unterzeichning". :::::It does not work for {{inscription|position=lower left|inscription}}, I suppose the reason has to do with white spaces, but I am somewhat recuctant to try to fix it, as it would probably make {{Inscription}} even harder to read that it currently is. --Zolo (talk) 14:12, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Well done! I checked some randome pages I worked on and it looks very nice and smooth! :D [[User:|DutchHoratius]] (talk) 15:54, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Capitalization does not work the "type" parameter is left blank and it will not work if the "type" output begins with an interwiki. Apart from that it should be okay. --Zolo (talk) 20:48, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Hello Zolo and DutchHoratius,

it looks very good this way! Thanks for your support, Zolo.

Hope you'll be able to keep this version ;-)

Jaybear (talk) 13:48, 7 May 2012 (UTC)