Template:Graft chimera/doc

The template (shortcut ) is for properly formatting the name of a graft chimera in the context of a scientific name (or as one), to comply with the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP). The style it uses has also been adopted by the British Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and many other organizations, and is standard practice in all horticultural writing (though exact spacing particulars may vary from publisher to publisher).

What it does for you

 * Inserts the "+" (plus) character at the start of the chimera name, and ensures the character is not italicized, both as required by the specification.
 * Ensures that the first letter of the input is capitalized, as required by the spec.
 * Italicizes the chimera name, as required by the spec.
 * Uses a hair space character between "+" and the actual name – optional in the spec, but a readability improvement over both full spacing and no spacing, and a metadata improvement over no spacing. It's also better than no spacing for accessibility reasons, since screen readers will interpret it as a plus character followed by a name to pronounce, rather than as a jumble of non-word code to sound out character by character. (A hair space is preferable to a thin space here, because the italics are only permitted to apply to the name not the interpolated "+", and the italic slant away from that character makes a thin space appear as large as a full space.) The template encodes this as a numeric character entity,, because the named HTML entity,  , fails in some browsers.
 * Wraps the entire construction in the template to prevent awkward line-breaking between the "+" and the name that follows it (because browsers are not consistent in how they treat hair spaces, and many will wrap immediately after one).

In short, it reduces this complicated and error-prone scrawl: to this:

Usage
Example of usage in mid-sentence:

which produces:

The graft chimera of Crataegus and Mespilus is.

This template should not be substituted. It is not designed for that, and doing so will impede part of the purpose of the template (to mark up chimerae names in a predictable, automated way so that if ICNCP changes their prescribed nomenclatural markup, a simple change to this template will apply the new style site-wide).

Usage in a book title in running prose (not in citation templates): For things italicized in running text (like a chimera name), the convention is to invert the italics when these appear inside a book title or other surrounding string that is itself italicized. This can be done with this template by using yes (or y). Example: which yields: This must not be used in titles of works in citation templates, as such markup breaks the citation template's COinS metadata. Just use a manual  (without  or other templating).
 * "According to Alice B. Ceesdale's The Horitculturist's : A Grafter's Handbook ..."