I've recently faced , looking around I've found also , and .

Should we delete them? I don't think they would help to find the questions, also I've never met anybody being expert of .

  • hm. I almost wish there was a master tag we could merge them all into, but they're all meta tags. – Journeyman Geek Aug 15 '16 at 9:59
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    @journeyman A good solution might be [document-design] or [document-layout], but I'm not entirely sure that users would find that when looking for "formatting" - we'd have to adjust the formatting wikis to point them there. – Raystafarian Aug 27 '16 at 10:10
  • We have a lot of suggestions for an encompassing tag name: [document-design], [document-layout], [page-layout], [page-formatting], etc. Actually, document structure might even be considered different from page structure. It would be good if people chimed in with suggestions. Also, we can have synonyms so people can find terms they relate to. One suggestion: [document-design] and [document-layout] as synonyms; and [page-layout] and [page-formatting] as separate synonyms. – fixer1234 Aug 31 '16 at 1:44

I thought there was a page formatting tag covering all these things, but apparently not. Individual tags for every page element make no sense. However, an argument can be made for a page formatting tag (admittedly meta).

It provides focus for the question, like the tag. How to do anything would vary with each application. We don't have experts in page formatting regardless of application. But getting fancy with it in any application can take a level of knowledge many users might not have. Also, people sometimes use focus tags to screen which questions they want to look at.

It wouldn't be the end of the world to have a page formatting meta tag. The fact that tags for each page element got created and used indicates that people think in those terms, and want a tag of some kind. If we create one, all encompassing, page formatting tag and synonomize the others with it, at least we can move users in a more constructive direction. It would also discourage having these tags recreated if we simply delete them.


Sounds like these might fit into as it is formatting the text around the page. We would need to synonymize those and then add those meta-features to the tag wiki. That being said, the is pretty weak as well.

  • I thought there was a tag like [page-layout]; maybe it got removed. [page-layout-view] seems to refer to the view, which is normally a menu selection; might cause confusion. Many people think of text formatting as different from page layout (appearance features of the characters vs. location control of things on the page, which can apply to more than text; someone thinking about a photo album wouldn't think "text formatting"). And the question of how much granularity do we need, and do we have a bunch of synonomized tags so people can find the terms they relate to, or keep the distinctions? – fixer1234 Aug 24 '16 at 19:27

Suggestion in an attempt to provide some organization. There's no way to make this perfectly clean, but this kind of structure may tend to attract questions into logical groups:

: use to encompass all things that deal with:

  • the appearance of characters: text attributes (e.g., bold, italics, strike-through, super/sub-script, color), font size, character spacing, hyphenation, and the like.
  • (Fonts): This is a closely related area, but we probably don't want to incorporate it because it is an entire subject area by itself. However, questions about things like applying an existing font could fit under text formatting.
  • Formatting contiguous blocks of text (this will overlap with the next group): things like indenting, tabs, bullets and numbering, text wrapping within a column, page and section breaks, text margins and borders within a table or column, adjusting content to fit in a space or on a page, etc.

and (synonyms): use to encompass all things that relate to positioning things on a page: headers, footers, margins, positioning objects, creating/modifying columns, linking text boxes and controlling the flow of text, wrapping text around objects, layers, tables, page layout considerations like mixing single and multiple columns, etc. This will overlap with the 3rd bullet, above, on contiguous blocks of text.

and (synonyms): use to encompass all things that relate to the overall structure of the document: templates; global document formatting rules; features that apply to the entire document, like index, TOC, and page background; graphic design or theme (even if located on only one page); in some documents, linking text boxes and controlling text flow might overlap here.

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