Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Review Suggested Edit

You can't approve or reject suggested edits because you haven't yet earned the Edit Posts ability.

Approved.
This suggested edit was approved and applied to the post almost 2 years ago by Alexei‭.

5 / 255
  • There are multiple reasons why using images of code, error, logs and other text resources used in programming instead of the actual text is _strongly discouraged_.
  • Shortly put, the question should be written in a form that **helps both the fellow community members to answer it** (e.g. easy to copy-paste the code to provide an answer) **and the future readers** (e.g. read and copy-paste the code).
  • Reasons to paste text instead of images:
  • - **hard to get the text** - it is harder to get the text from an image than a direct copy-paste. This means wasted time for a person who want to answer it due to extra effort involved in retyping the provided code
  • - **harder to read** - most of the images will be shrunk to fit the post maximum width, will be unreadable and thus force the reader to open it separately to view it full width
  • - **non-searchability** - site search or search engine will not get to the text inside the image
  • - **non-accessibility** - screen readers need to be [way smarter](https://tink.uk/thoughts-on-screen-readers-and-image-recognition) to get the text from an image, so it will make life harder for those with visual impairments
  • - **hides formatting, whitespace, or incorrect characters** - prevents the readers from fully understanding some possible errors caused by incorrect indentation, non-visible characters or Unicode characters that look identical to the ANSI ones
  • Note: This post was inspired by [a very similar SO one](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/285557/2780791).
  • There are multiple reasons why using images of code, errors, logs and other text resources used in programming instead of the actual text is _strongly discouraged_.
  • Shortly put, the question should be written in a form that **helps both the fellow community members to answer it** (e.g. easy to copy-paste the code to provide an answer) **and the future readers** (e.g. read and copy-paste the code).
  • Reasons to paste text instead of images:
  • - **hard to get the text** - it is harder to get the text from an image than a direct copy-paste. This means wasted time for a person who wants to answer it due to extra effort involved in retyping the provided code
  • - **harder to read** - most of the images will be shrunk to fit the post maximum width, will be unreadable and thus force the reader to open it separately to view it full width
  • - **non-searchability** - site search or search engine will not get to the text inside the image
  • - **non-accessibility** - screen readers need to be [way smarter](https://tink.uk/thoughts-on-screen-readers-and-image-recognition) to get the text from an image, so it will make life harder for those with visual impairments
  • - **hides formatting, whitespace, or incorrect characters** - prevents the readers from fully understanding some possible errors caused by incorrect indentation, non-visible characters or Unicode characters that look identical to the ANSI ones
  • Note: This post was inspired by [a very similar SO one](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/285557/2780791).

Suggested almost 2 years ago by trichoplax‭