Hi all.

I just wonder about this since I'm not speaking native english.

In most tutorial's I seen the term "Press down button". For me, it souds like I'm supposed to keep the button down for a while. I'm sure I'm wrong here, but can anybody confirm this?

Also the term "Hit any button" is used pretty often. This expression is pretty obvious telling me to barely make the button have contact for a fraction of a second.

I like to refer to this thread where I first interpreted "press space bar" as to "keep Space bar down for a while and release".

Thanks

I think the problem is that in English we haven't figured out a standard. >.<

However, when it says Hit, or Touch, or Press or Type: it's all the same action. Tap it like you would at any other time.

The only time a key is held down for any length of time, other than wanting a series of keystrokes, are keys like Shift, Ctrl, Alt, arrow keys... that sort.

So: hit, touch, press, type = all the same thing.

Happy Inkscaping.

Ok, thanks a lot

In my language, the term "press" is actualy what mothers do to straighten their childrens clothings with steamer. So therefore, the term "press" is in my head (before sense overrides) interpreted as "keep it down hard" and make it straight

You're very welcome. And you're not too far off. We can have our clothing pressed too, in English. Hitting someone is very unkind. Tapping is also an action that can be done in may different ways, such as tapping your hand on your knee as you listen to music.

The real problem is the technology has moved faster than the language. The standard seems to be "hit" and "press" might be used to avoid any violence imagery.

Grobe wrote:I like to refer to this thread where I first interpreted "press space bar" as to "keep Space bar down for a while and release".

In my defense I'd like to add that English isn't my native language either

After reading your reply there, I reread my own comment, and I do agree that it's instructions are not very clear. I will try to do better and provide more precise instructions ("hit the space bar once to drop a copy of the selected objects") or maybe more often copy the exact wording from the manual («Hitting the Space Bar while dragging or transforming an object with the mouse will “drop” a copy of the object at the current point. »)

"Hit" has somehow become sort of a slang term for 'touch something quickly'. I learned it from my mom, so I suspect it might have started in the WWII era. But recently I've heard people say it's too violent of a connotation, because we really don't hit a key or keyboard. So I've come to use press instead. I know that some people refer to ironing clothes as "pressing". But press can also mean push, like in 'press a button' or 'push a button' which I think is how it comes to apply to keys on a keyboard. So I think "press" or "push" are most appropriate. To me, "tap" is more of a quick action, and often if I've tapped a key, it was too quick for Inkscape to catch. Plus it would be hard to make the tap synchronous with the click.

But then I'm strictly an English speaker, except for a handful of Spanish words.