If you look around, you will notice that in addition to Blank/Unblank, several names have changed over the last couple of releases, such as 'Hollow' is now 'Shell', and 'Taper' is now 'Draft'. Some of this was done to make the terms used on NX more consistent with other systems, which was the case with Hollow/Shell. Or it was felt that it was better to use terms which were used in the world of engineering, which is why we changed Taper, which was felt to be a mathematical concept, to Draft, which is more in line with what tool designers and manufacturing engineers called it.
However, when it came to Blank and Unblank, it was something totally different. It had more to do with how we designed NX to work when using a language other than English.
In case you've never thought about it, what happens is that as NX is running and a dialog is displayed, the system will, on the fly, replace every piece of text in the dialog using a scheme that matches the current text string with a matching text string found in the specified foreign language look-up table, which contains corresponding but translated text for EVERY text string found in any NX dialog or menu. Now if you think that this will slow NX down, well even those of you who are running the 'English' version of NX, the translation is taking place as you use NX since the user interface was actually coded in ALL CAPS and so this 'read & replace' mechanism, just as if it were translating say English to German, is 'translating'
UPPERCASE ENGLISH to
Mixed Case English (which is how we detect if there is no match yet defined for a new text string in NX since when running the software, usually in early integration phases, you will see occasionally see UPPERCASE TEXT in a menu or dialog).
Anyway, getting back to Blank and Unblank, the problem is that we have to actually research, decided on and enter all of the properly translated text strings and match them up with each text string we expect to find in NX. And as anyone who speaks multiple languages can tell you, often there is no one-to-one translation and so we have to be very careful that we use English words which will be unambiguous when looking for a foreign equivalent, but it helps IF the English word is ACTUALLY AN ENGLISH WORD!
Now we didn't have a lot of problems with Blank (although most of the Romance languages tend to think that this means White instead of being unseen or invisible) but it was Unblank that really messed us up.
You see, there is NO word 'Unblank' in the English language!!!
If you don't believe me, try writing 'unblank' in MS Word. Or grab you Webster's and look it up. It's just ain't there. So if it's NOT in the standard English dictionary, why would we expect to find it one of the English-to-French or -German or -Spanish dictionaries?
This is just another example of how in English we have NO problem adding an 'un' as the prefix to a word and accepting the idea that it now mean the opposite, just like we all know what 'Uncola' means. So we had to find a replacement for 'Unblank' and a good alternative was 'Show', which then made 'Hide' the obvious choice to replace 'Blank'.
Anyway, I know that was a long reply, but I think it's useful for people to understand, and perhaps better appreciate, some of the issues which we (or any software vendor) has to live with when trying to make their products as easy to use as possible by the largest number of people as possible.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.