I've been finishing up just a bit of the "boilerplate" content for my forthcoming book about custom tasks. One of the final tasks is to write the introduction, also known as the "About this Book" section.
SAS Press offers a template with examples of a few essential topics to address in this part. One of the topics describes the typographical standards that are used throughout the book. This describes the obvious stuff: what code sections look like, the special meaning of words in bold type, and so on.
SAS Press authors have considerable leeway when choosing how to cover such topics. As the author of several technical books, papers, and this blog, I doubted that a section on typography was even needed. However, in the event that the editors deem it essential, I provided a draft, which follows.
Typographical Conventions Used in this Book
The following typographic conventions are used in this book:
| regular | used for most of the regular words in this book. Longer words have more regular letters than shorter words. |
| Italic | used for the words that are slanted, or leaning just a little bit to the right. |
| Bold | used to indicate that this word is slightly thicker than the other words around it. |
| Word→Another Word | used when one word points to another word. It's a subtle encouragement to continue reading from left-to-right. |
As a result, I've been told to expect that this section will most likely not appear in the book. I hope that my readers don't miss it too much.
1 Comment
I enjoy your posts. This one definitely made me chuckle... I think it would be a great addition to the book. Thanks for all you do to enlighten us.