From the latest issue of Bioinformatics we have a new tool that is an R package for the analysis of GWAS studies. Rather than name the tool, I want you all to first see it exactly as it appears in the journal:

The first character in the name of this software is a character which can often be hard to identify, particularly when certain fonts makes it look like it could be the letters L or I, or even the number 1.

This is not a name that is worthy of a JABBA-award, but it does fall in to my category of posts which I call almost JABBA, for software names that have various other issues. The particular issue in this case is that the name is hard to read and therefore hard to pronounce. I feel that the use of lower-case characters makes it more likely that the reader will attempt to pronounce this as a word, rather than read it as an initialism. E.g. maybe you saw this name and read it as 'Lurgpurr', or 'Ergpurr'.

The reason behind the name is not explained in the article, but when you go to the linked software page, all is revealed:

It's a bit odd that one of the five words that appear in this name ('Gaussian') doesn't get mentioned anywhere in the paper. But more importantly, why did they feel the need for using lower-case characters? 'LRGPR' would have been much easier to read and comprehend than the font-dependent 'lrgpr'.