This manual uses several conventions to highlight certain words and phrases and draw attention to specific pieces of information.
2.1. Typographic Conventions
Four typographic conventions are used to call attention to specific words and phrases. These conventions, and the circumstances they apply to, are as follows.
Mono-spaced Bold
Used to highlight system input, including shell commands, file names and paths. Also used to highlight key caps and key-combinations. For example:
To see the contents of the file my_next_bestselling_novel in your current working directory, enter the cat my_next_bestselling_novel command at the shell prompt and press
Enter
to execute the command.
The above includes a file name, a shell command and a key cap, all presented in Mono-spaced Bold and all distinguishable thanks to context.
Key-combinations can be distinguished from key caps by the hyphen connecting each part of a key-combination. For example:
Press
Enter
to execute the command.
Press
Ctrl
+
Alt
+
F1
to switch to the first virtual terminal. Press
Ctrl
+
Alt
+
F7
to return to your X-Windows session.
The first sentence highlights the particular key cap to press. The second highlights two sets of three key caps, each set pressed simultaneously.
If source code is discussed, class names, methods, functions, variable names and returned values mentioned within a paragraph will be presented as above, in Mono-spaced Bold. For example:
File-related classes include filesystem for file systems, file for files, and dir for directories. Each class has its own associated set of permissions.
Proportional Bold
This denotes words or phrases encountered on a system, including application names; dialogue box text; labelled buttons; check-box and radio button labels; menu titles and sub-menu titles. For example:
Choose from the main menu bar to launch
Mouse Preferences
. In the
Buttons
tab, click the
Left-handed mouse
check box and click
Close
to switch the primary mouse button from the left to the right (making the mouse suitable for use in the left hand).
To insert a special character into a
gedit
file, choose from the main menu bar. Next, choose from the
Character Map
menu bar, type the name of the character in the
Search
field and click
Next
. The character you sought will be highlighted in the
Character Table
. Double-click this highlighted character to place it in the
Text to copy
field and then click the
Copy
button. Now switch back to your document and choose from the
gedit
menu bar.
The above text includes application names; system-wide menu names and items; application-specific menu names; and buttons and text found within a GUI interface, all presented in Proportional Bold and all distinguishable by context.
Note the shorthand used to indicate traversal through a menu and its sub-menus. This is to avoid the difficult-to-follow 'Select from the sub-menu in the menu of the main menu bar' approach.
Mono-spaced Bold Italic
or
Proportional Bold Italic
Whether Mono-spaced Bold or Proportional Bold, the addition of Italics indicates replaceable or variable text. Italics denotes text you do not input literally or displayed text that changes depending on circumstance. For example:
To connect to a remote machine using ssh, type
ssh
username
@
domain.name
at a shell prompt. If the remote machine is
example.com and your username on that machine is john, type
ssh [email protected].
The mount -o remount
file-system
command remounts the named file system. For example, to remount the /home file system, the command is mount -o remount /home.
To see the version of a currently installed package, use the rpm -q
package
command. It will return a result as follows:
package-version-release
.
Note the words in bold italics above — username, domain.name, file-system, package, version and release. Each word is a placeholder, either for text you enter when issuing a command or for text displayed by the system.
Aside from standard usage for presenting the title of a work, italics denotes the first use of a new and important term. For example:
When the Apache HTTP Server accepts requests, it dispatches child processes or threads to handle them. This group of child processes or threads is known as a server-pool. Under Apache HTTP Server 2.0, the responsibility for creating and maintaining these server-pools has been abstracted to a group of modules called Multi-Processing Modules (MPMs). Unlike other modules, only one module from the MPM group can be loaded by the Apache HTTP Server.
