Preface

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:

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:

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:

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:

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 Mouse from the Preferences sub-menu in the System 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:

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:

Two, commonly multi-line, data types are set off visually from the surrounding text.

Output sent to a terminal is set in Mono-spaced Roman and presented thus:

books        Desktop   documentation  drafts  mss    photos   stuff  svn
books_tests  Desktop1  downloads      images  notes  scripts  svgs

Source-code listings are also set in Mono-spaced Roman but are presented and highlighted as follows:

package org.jboss.book.jca.ex1;

import javax.naming.InitialContext;

public class ExClient
{
   public static void main(String args[]) 
       throws Exception
   {
      InitialContext iniCtx = new InitialContext();
      Object         ref    = iniCtx.lookup("EchoBean");
      EchoHome       home   = (EchoHome) ref;
      Echo           echo   = home.create();

      System.out.println("Created Echo");

      System.out.println("Echo.echo('Hello') = " + echo.echo("Hello"));
   }
   
}

Finally, we use three visual styles to draw attention to information that might otherwise be overlooked.