Template talk:LetterPic

Link Compatability

Occasionally, a Letter Pic starts a word that's also a link. This template and links don't play well together. For an example, take a look at Lore:Brief History of the Empire v 2 and its associated gamespace pages. Using the LetterPic in such a situation breaks the link on pages where the pic appears, as you can see on the Oblivion and Skyrim pages. It's not a big deal there because that particular link it breaks is both unimportant and redundant.

However, there are some pages where the links are pretty essential. In those situations, my life sucks donkey balls. For example, see Lore:The Book of Daedra. Getting letter pics to appear on the proper pages and getting the links to work in an aesthetically pleasing manner becomes a giant pain, especially in situations like that where there are many namespaces involved.

Anyways, maybe there's an easy way to get them to work together now that I don't know about, but if there's not, it would prevent some headaches in the future if this template could be tweaked somehow to work well with links. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 04:03, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

It's not ideal, but I added a link= parameter to the template. I had to restore the old Template:Navimg to do it. I'm not sure why that was deleted, or if there's a better way to do what it did. If there is, we need to change the section on Help:Images#Linkable_Images to reflect that. I'd also like to get the letters to be baseline aligned, but not sure how to accomplish that with Navimg. This is probably not the best solution ultimately, but best I can come up with right now. TheRealLurlock (talk) 14:09, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

Compared to what I was doing before, it's excellent! Thank you! Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 16:17, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

Lurlock: Navimg is no longer required. Plain old [[File:...]] links can now take a link= parameter to link to something. I'll have a look at the changes you made and convert it.

As far as the larger issue goes, it's definitely a nuisance. The other method I've used is to link only the plain-text part of the word and just leave the letter unlinked. – Robin Hood↝talk 16:24, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

I just used it on Lore:Trials of St. Alessia, as well. I considered going leaving things unlinked, but I didn't think it looked very good on non-letterpic pages, and I didn't want to distract readers. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 16:33, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

Apparently, Alfwyn and I both just tried to remove the Navimgs at the same time. :) I clobbered his changes only because mine kept the optional title parameter. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for plain-text links (e.g., the Lore pages). For now, when a linked graphic letter is displayed, the default hover text is just the plain-text letter. I'm wondering if perhaps we shouldn't change that to default to the link instead, though. Plain-text letters will do that anyway unless we get creative, and unlinked letters display no hover text at all. – Robin Hood↝talk 16:54, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

Actually, I'm just noticing that unlinked letterpics used to display the letter and link to the image. Do we want that behaviour restored? If so, I'll integrate both Alfwyn's changes and mine, which should do that. I wasn't thinking of that effect when I added the link parameter. – Robin Hood↝talk 16:57, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

Not sure if linking to the image page is worth worrying about. Duplicating the switch is probably not a good idea anyway. Another way would be using link={{{link|File:imagepath.jpg}}}. --Alfwyn (talk) 17:08, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

(←) That's actually the solution I was thinking of. Like you say, though, I'm not sure if it really serves any purpose to link to the image page. The hover text could arguably be worth restoring, though, since some of those letters can be hard to read. I'll leave it as is for now until we get further input. If we leave the unlinked images without hover text, though, I'm thinking we should convert the linked ones to display the link in the hover text rather than the letter. – Robin Hood↝talk 18:22, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

This conversation sailed over my head a while ago. All I know is I've run into the issue again on Lore:The True Nature of Orcs (both the Oblivion and Skyrim versions have letter pics). I guess I'll wait until you all have conjured up a final solution. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 19:38, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

Basically all we're debating is which of each of the following is better (hover over each to see the difference).

Unlinked pictures: vs.

Linked pictures: vs.

– Robin Hood↝talk 21:57, 21 October 2012 (GMT)

Ah, thanks for the illuminating me. Can't say I have a preference. But it doesn't seem like anything I can do will interfere with that, so I'll keep adding the template. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 22:38, 21 October 2012 (GMT)